Cynthia Miller Idriss: "Extremism and Youth Radicalisation"

I want to thank you for hosting me here, and also the U.S. Embassy and especially the consulate

here in Leipzig that's hosting me as part of this U.S. State Department speaker tour.

So this is my very last stop in a very busy week of talks in Berlin and Frankfurt, Erfurt,

Hülheim, and now Leipzig, and so I'm really excited.

And I've given lots of different types of talks, this is the only one that I'm giving

just like this to you for this audience.

I promise there's only two slides with text, the rest are all images, but we'll get them

over with at the beginning, so that's just to explain some of the history here.

So when I talk about far right, that's a term that is very difficult in the U.S., it's highly

polarized right now, nobody wants to use the terms far right or far left, but I use it

even though it's not helpful sometimes in the U.S. context, because it is the term used

by the Global Terrorism Database, and so a lot of the data is using the terminology of

far right.

In the U.S. it's moved to domestic violent extremism, so I will talk a little bit about

why they use DVE.

DVE includes the left and the right, so they include animal rights activists in there,

animal rights extremists I should say, but also anarchists.

But really, when people say domestic violent extremism right now, what they're talking

about in the U.S. is white supremacist extremism and anti-government extremism, those are the

categories that the threat assessments say are the most pressing and the most lethal,

and I can, I'll just tell you this, but then happy to answer questions on the actual state

of it in the U.S., on every measure that we have available, we've seen spikes and increases,

you can go one more.

Every type of hate crime is up, anti-Semitism is at historic highs, Islamophobia at an eight-year

high, anti-LGBTQ sentiment is either at an all-time high or at a 12-year spike, depending

on which data sets you look at, I mean, it's all bad across the board, every measure.

So that's probably the easiest way to signal that you can go one more.

And just to say that although the problem is global, as you know, a far-right extremism,

a far-right terrorism, the U.S. has a disproportionate share of the data, of what we know in the

data to be both the number of attacks, which is about half, and the lethality.

We have about half of the lethality.

We also export the majority of the propaganda on the white supremacist side.

It's about 85% from what I saw in the most recent data.

So we're responsible for exporting a lot of the propaganda, which circulates in other

countries including here in Germany.

So we can go one more.

What I'm going to talk about are these trends in radicalization.

I use J.M.

Berger's definition for that, for extremism and for radicalization, which means coming

to accept a way of thinking that positions us versus them in a way that sees the other

as an existential threat, a dire threat that has to be met with violence because the future

of one's family or people or way of life is completely threatened.

That's different from, for example, the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism defines extremism

as on the fringes of society as opposed to the mainstream.

I and my lab prefer to define this as us versus them because it allows us to think about extremism

when it's in the mainstream, not just as something that sits outside of it.

So what I will talk about is probably going to be quite familiar to most of you, I think,

on the transformation side because the aesthetic transformation on symbols and clothing began

here in Germany, really, and in Eastern Europe.

But significant changes in the aesthetic codes and symbols, and especially since the advent

of social media and memes, in how those are produced.

So not waiting for production of symbols, but youth being able to produce them themselves

very quickly and rapidly, organically evolving.

A lot of use of humor and satire and wit as a way of weaponizing youth culture.

And then what the book really talks about is a wide variety of places and spaces where

people encounter that propaganda.

So I'll just say that one of the reasons I wrote this book is because I was irritated

at the way the U.S. government was approaching the issue, which was they kept asking people

like me to explain how do the groups work, what's the chain of command, and how can we

infiltrate and monitor and surveil them?

Like they had this mindset that was really very much rooted in ISIS, in Islamist sort

of forms of extremism, because that's the entire infrastructure of U.S. extremism research

and prevention in the post-9/11 context.

Because although the far right, especially the white supremacist side, started to grow

in 2009, was the first spike in hate groups, it wasn't until 2020 that the U.S. officially

acknowledged under the Trump administration in October, actually, that white supremacist

extremism is the most pressing and lethal threat, along with anti-government extremism.

That then led to, after January 6, a slight strengthening of the language on anti-government

extremism and then the first national strategy to counter domestic violent extremism, which

happened in June of 2021.

So we're only two years into having any strategy at all on the official level at the national

federal side of things in the U.S.

I'll talk at the end about how radical that strategy was, actually, I think it's a pretty

radical shift for the U.S. to acknowledge what they call now a public health approach, which

is something we've been calling for for a long time to prevention.

But I will say that the implementation has really, really been slow.

And all of the implementation that I've seen essentially is still on the security side,

not on the education side.

So I'll talk about that later, because I do want to talk about what do we do about this.

So when I first, I became an accidental expert on this, not intentionally, because I was

studying the German [GERMAN] system.

I was a comparative education scholar.

I was really interested in the vocational system because we don't have it.

I was a German area studies major and then became a comparative education person who

taught Americans about European style vocational training systems.

And I came to do fieldwork in some three vocational schools for my dissertation in the year 2000,

just as there was not only a surge in far-right extremism, white supremacist neo-nazism here,

but also new investments coming from the government, the first [GERMAN] new ways of engaging with

communities, new prevention approaches were starting at that time.

And I was spending 18 months hanging around [GERMAN] who were like spending all their

time thinking about how do they address their [GERMAN] and [GERMAN] apprentices who were

shaved heads and bomber jackets and combat boots to class.

So I just was fascinated by their efforts.

I went to retreats with them.

I spent a lot of time.

And at that time, the classrooms looked pretty much like this that I was in.

A lot of them, I mean, it was really uniform, very clear for teachers.

And so you can go like four ahead.

That's New York City.

So I just wanted to show you that at that time, around the same time, this is in New

York City at the pride parade.

The American far-right scene had nothing original about it at all.

It was 100% copying old neo-Nazi symbols and really just not modifying that.

So this was a common scene in the small but vocal neo-Nazi and white supremacist scene

in the US.

But after I wrote that first book, I came back to the same schools, to two schools for

construction trades in Berlin for another project that became this book, The Extreme

Gone Mainstream, because as you know, what began to happen was a mainstreaming of the

aesthetic scene.

And that wasn't happening in the US yet.

It happened here first.

And I got totally fascinated by these symbols, by the codes, by the way, the quality of the

clothing.

You can go one ahead.

By the way that even the legal line was being towed very carefully with game playing.

So when you see this brand that as English speakers, you'll recognize, of course, this

is the Latvian word for Hagenkreuz says swastika, but English speakers recognize it as swastika.

But it would be, of course, illegals, did it say Hagenkreuz, but right on the right

hand side where it tells you all about the quality of the cotton and the zipper and how

good it is.

And it costs 76 euros, not cheap.

But the first line says, "Rechtliche Absolut unbedenklich," right?

So it's telling you that you're okay, you're on solid ground here.

So people start sending me photos, of course, all the time.

And they knew I'm studying this.

So I got this photo from a colleague, a photographer in Dortmund in 2016, where this ended up in

the galley of images for the book, where you then saw things like this happen a lot where

the vowels were dropped out of a word.

That led to a whole lot of legal debates about whether a word is a word if the vowels are

removed.

It turns out it's not a word, so it's not illegal.

Also, by the way, is the Run DMC logo, if you don't know that, that is an American rap

band from the 1980s.

That was a troll against an anti-racist group that had had a concert that year using the

Run DMC logo.

So there was a lot of signaling going on with this one t-shirt.

But if you can skip forward, what we began to see very quickly after that was copying

America, this is an American brand, copying that German dropping out of the vowels.

Even though there's no legal, first of all, even if it was a swastika, it's not illegal

in the U.S. because of free speech protections.

But certainly the word "white" is not illegal to put on a t-shirt, but they did it anyway.

So they're globally signaling the same type of participation.

So then around the same time, you start to see distributors pop up like this one in France,

both selling t-shirts again with the vowels dropped out at the bottom, but more importantly,

how rapidly it spread, the logos here are like brands in Ukraine and Russia, Poland,

Germany, France.

They have children's lines, they have women's lines, accessories, you can buy belts and

little bags and all kinds of things.

So it became a market in and of its own right.

And that is also, the name of that distributor was at that time also a play on sounds.

If you don't already know it, it was too whitey for you.

If you sound it out, it's too white for you.

So a lot of that kind of global game playing and signaling was going on.

And lastly, you know, we saw, of course, a lot of historic signaling, not just of World

War II, this is an Austrian brand, but also pogroms from sort of the 15th century, the

use of anti-immigrant sort of concepts that were embedded in much more historical discussions.

And so this became popular in the US as well, even though, you know, it's a totally different

historical context.

So overall, what we began to see here are things like, you know, this t-shirt says we're

not radical.

We're just early.

It was this way of kind of framing far-right ideas as edgier, as cooler and as counterculture

to a triggered mainstream that just couldn't take the joke, right, a sort of boring set

of triggered snowflakes, your parents, your teachers, you're provocative, they're serious

and boring.

They don't get the joke.

We're not radical.

We're just early.

And so far-right itself, especially in the far-right in the US at that time, the so-called

alt-right became the kind of youth counterculture to a boring mainstream.

And that drew a lot of young men in.

Then the next thing that happened, of course, is that it wasn't just on t-shirts anymore,

but very quickly around that same time memes took off.

And when you started to see Pepe the Frog, poor Pepe the Frog, who, as you probably know,

had nothing to do with the far-right, was a cartoon created by an artist named Matt

Greiner who's suing now to reclaim, I mean, who are you going to reclaim it from, the

internet?

Like it's, you can't, right?

He can't get it back.

But you know, it was an affable character for lots of reasons, got popular in memes.

And then, you know, far-right got a hold of it and started putting him into offensive

memes, offensive kind of outfits, the KKK related to the Holocaust Nazi iconography.

And he then became so ubiquitously used as a symbol of the modern white supremacist movement

at that time that he landed on the hate symbols database at the anti-defamation league so

that teachers and others would be aware when they're seeing kids put him in the emojis

or in the avatars, et cetera.

So you know, that would have been the end of that probably, except some kid online discovered

that there's an Egyptian god of the frogs named Kek and decided that there would be

a mythical land called Kekistan and Pepe was Lord Kek and you know, Kek of course also

stands for LOL online, for online laughter.

I mean, there are lots of reasons why it was popular, but again, they made a flag, this

mythical place, which seems still sort of fantastical and ridiculous until that flag

starts to show up in offline violence, right?

So it's an online meme that creates a kind of online fantastical mythical world.

And then there it is on the upper left-hand corner at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

This lower left-hand corner is in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

It's in London in the upper center.

And the one that shocks me the most, although it shouldn't shock me at this point is January

6 at the U.S. Capitol.

So you know, when we were analyzing imagery from January 6 where I was right in D.C. that

day and we're watching it live on TV and you could just see it, there's the Kekistan flag

right there on January 6 and like, I cannot believe the Kekistan flag is weaving a mile

from my house, like on the top of the U.S. Capitol with smoke and the Trump flag in the

background.

It was, it was shocking and people don't recognize it as a white supremacist symbol.

So you know, that took a while too to explain.

So you know, the far right around that time starts explaining itself or referring to itself

as being in a meme war, as meme war veterans.

And then, then the Boogaloo scene.

So can you raise your hand if you have heard of the Boogaloo before?

This helps.

Okay, good.

So not many people.

All right.

Then we'll start at the very beginning, which is good because even because it's really weird.

So there was a 1984 breakdancing movie sequel that was widely regarded as terrible and teenagers

online for some reason started using, and it had the word Boogaloo in the title of the

movie and they started using the word Boogaloo to refer to the second of something and then

to the second of anything and then it became the second civil war.

Who knows how, that's youth culture online, right?

So it became a code for the second civil war.

I started seeing it on t-shirts in the summer of 2019.

So that's around, it was probably being used before that in some cultures, but that's when

we started to see it really publicly in the US.

Then the pandemic hits, the state Capitol protests start, the Boogaloo groups state

it was really minor and fringe until then.

And then they started growing really fast online.

So hundreds of thousands of members joining these Boogaloo groups on Facebook.

So Facebook shuts them down in May of 2020 and they immediately start using sound-alike

words within a day, big igloo, blue igloo, big luau.

Then big luau up there in the center, that meme you can see got really popular again

in about 24 hours because luaus feature pig roasts.

Pig is a American slur for the police and so that hat on the pig is the ATF, which is

a police insignia in the US.

And they started wearing Hawaiian shirts at the state protests because of the luau, which

is itself a sound-alike word for the Boogaloo, which is itself a code word for a coming civil

war.

So again, all sounds pretty ridiculous, but there are five terrorism trials underway in

the US because they murdered five people in the summer of 2020.

So what started as a kind of joke among teenagers became a domestic terrorism phenomenon really

quickly.

And then to add to the complication, I guess, part of what made it so hard to explain in

sort of policymaking circles was that it's not a group.

It's not a group.

It's a concept.

And the concept had people form little groups around it.

But those groups didn't share an ideology.

There's no common ideology for the Boogaloo.

It's just a concept, a coming civil war.

Why they have a coming civil war, they don't agree on.

The reasons why, they don't even agree on the tactics and they don't always agree on

other ideological components.

So when you see this Boogaloo Boys, I call themselves Boogaloo Boys, but when you see

this Boogaloo Boys patch, you know, because of the Pepe the Frog, that that's a white

supremacist Boogaloo Boy group.

So some of them are white supremacists and they showed up at Black Lives Matter protests

in the summer of 2020 and marched across the street from Black Lives Matter protesters

and were there intimidating and with their Hawaiian shirts and their SWAT gear and their

heavily armed, you know, automatic rifles looking really threatening.

But others of them during that same summer marched alongside Black Lives Matter protesters

because they saw themselves as having a shared goal of anti-law enforcement activity and

hatred toward law enforcement.

And then they were not, they kind of like didn't like the Boogaloo Boys who were white

supremacists and would deny that they're white supremacists, right?

So, so you can't assume they're white supremacists.

You can't assume they have a clear ideology because they don't, but they're dangerous

and they did murder people and they are on trial.

So and they were mobilized basically by a meme, right?

So a meme, a concept.

So when you see this, this Task Force Igloo patch, it's one of my favorite patches of

the whole set of insignia because it has everything in it, sort of, A, it's a meme-based insurgency

as they refer to it, Task Force Igloo, which you know means Boogaloo, which you know means

coming civil war, the second civil war.

They're playing here on a American flag motif that became popular over the last 10 or 15

years, but especially after Black Lives Matter protesters that had support for the police

in the color of the stripes.

So if you ever saw those, there was like a red stripe.

Support for police.

There's like a blue stripe with support for law enforcement.

There were green stripes for like park workers for some reason.

Like it became like this whole sort of like, yeah.

So like, you know, you'd be driving around, you're like, what is that flag with that color

stripe?

But so they have here the Hawaiian flag, you know, the Hawaiian stripe, which then means

civil war or it's anti-law enforcement in this case because that Hawaiian stripe would

mean the luau, which refers to the pig roast, which is an anti-law enforcement symbol.

And then they've got the revolutionary insignia on there and the modern gun, right?

So there's a lot going on in just that one patch that they'd have like on the side of

their arm.

Okay, so you can go one more.

So that's the memes.

But just to say really quickly before I get to what do we do about this, I wrote this

book because that was happening, you know, sort of leading up into the book.

And I'm, because I'm right in Washington and I knew something about youth culture, online

radicalization, I was being asked to explain this a lot, testify before Congress.

And, and again, you know, you're, you're like in front of Congress having to explain something

like Pepe the Frog, and it just was a very odd moment, right?

Like sometimes people don't even understand what a meme is in those conversations, right?

So you're like, well, it's like a cultural bit.

Sometimes they're like, is it a cartoon?

Sometimes it's a cartoon.

It's not always a cartoon, right?

Like, so, you know, it was really, really hard to explain how violence could be mobilized

by a meme or could be potentially mobilized by a concept, but not an ideology, how sometimes

the ideologies don't map onto each other.

And more importantly, what I tried to argue at the time and why I wrote Hate in the Homeland

is because I think it almost doesn't matter how and why groups exist.

They do produce the propaganda.

So it's not that it doesn't matter.

I want somebody to care about it.

But what I'm much more interested in as an educator is where and when people encounter

the propaganda.

I assume that everyone encounters it at some point online and that we have to understand

that it happens in spaces and places that you might not anticipate.

So in YouTube hobby channels, in Instagram accounts that are aesthetically much different

and more pleasing to the eye than they used to be, for example, in, you know, when there

was a shop in Berlin that was called "Buy or Die," right, like that was a really obvious

dark black script.

Like you kind of knew what you'd be walking into, but not like the kind of glass and steel

and well-lit mainstream appearance.

There's a chapter on college campuses, which I will have to like happy to talk about what's

happening on our college campuses since October 7th.

But it's college campuses even before this, before the pandemic were the number one site

for white supremacist propaganda.

So college campuses have been, for the last six or seven years, kind of a site of tremendous

sets of conflict and ideological fomentation.

We had several hate crimes on my campus, nooses hung, cotton stalks and Confederate flags.

We've had every type of extremist propaganda, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, white supremacist

propaganda show up on campus.

Those paper flyers, which are really old school tactic, have been tracked to only 11 groups.

So thousands and thousands of paper flyers showing up across the country on college campuses,

but it's the same 11 groups doing it.

Most of them come from just three groups and a lot of it from Texas.

So I will say from a group in Texas.

And then there's the mixed martial arts scene and the combat sports, which again is much

more commonly understood in Germany, Eastern Europe and Russia, but now we have a kind

of active club scene emerging in the U.S. that is not as well understood.

So okay, what do we do about this?

So around the same time, as I was feeling like I needed to write the book, the head

of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center asked me to go to coffee

and said, you know, they'd been tracking, they've been tracking hate for decades.

They do a really good hate map.

If you haven't looked at their map, like it's, they do a good job of tracking hate.

That's what their job is, monitoring hate, but they wanted to start investing in preventing

it.

So she said, I'll never forget the wording of the question because it was so amazing.

She said, what would it take to create a nationally scalable, empirically tested intervention

to prevent young people from being persuaded by white supremacist propaganda?

And I thought like people who are doctors like must have the experience sometimes of

like someone on a plane needing a doctor, like that doesn't happen to cultural sociologists,

right?

Like nobody asks us like to solve really like a pressing problem.

So I was really, I was like, I actually know the answer to this.

Like I know an answer anyway, not what it would take, but what it would take to get

there, which is to bring in unconventional experts and you know, more social workers

and mental health counselors and educators and people who work on social justice and

immigration and have them start working on it because in the US at that point, a hundred

percent of prevention was being done by security and intelligence sectors.

There's nothing coming up from the education sector.

So in the end, she gave me some funding to hold those meetings.

And so you can just skip forward and one more, I think.

And so we in the end, you know, became advocates for a public health approach, which is I think

much more again, like what you already have and have had in Germany for so long, but which

is really different and really new in the US context.

We only have one federal place for prevention funding and it is in the Department of Homeland

Security.

So the only way to fund prevention is through a securitized lens.

And until two years ago, that prevention funding was only allowed to be used for work that

would prevent a radicalized person from becoming violent.

That was the intent of the prevention funding.

So that's secondary prevention and not to prevent people from becoming radicalized to

begin with, which would be primary prevention.

So we really have not, we're not the only ones we've been advocating very hard for a

different way of thinking about prevention that is much more based in digital media literacy

and helping people understand how their children encounter these types of things.

And I'm really happy that the Biden administration did in their first national strategy to counter

domestic extremism, adopt the language of a public health approach.

So that is officially the US strategy now.

Although like I said, I don't think it's happened really at all, but to be fair, it's only been

two years and I'm a patient.

So just to say a couple of things that we do in our lab.

So I created this lab then after those meetings, we had so many great ideas.

We decided we should really go after some funding to start designing and testing tools

and interventions to try to engage more on the primary level.

And we found out that there are no rules for naming a lab in the university, that there

are rules if you call yourself a center, an Institute, you need permission, but we didn't

need permission to name the lab.

So we just made it up.

We called ourselves a lab.

And then, you know, it's a good story about kind of entrepreneurial stuff in the university

that you can't, it's very hard to get a center named in the US, but we named it as a lab.

And that helped us actually, like within a couple of months, because we existed as a

lab, we became strategic partners with the center for research on extremism in Norway.

And we became, you know, we sort of had an identity and then we began winning grants

to do the work.

And so anyway, I'm happy to talk about that, why it is that it's so hard to do this without

a name.

But we first partnered with Southern Poverty Law Center, but also Jigsaw at Google to work,

the Google work was all on pre-bunking, which I know there was just a big pre-bunking campaign

here in Germany, so you may know about it.

It is a media literacy tactic that teaches people in short form video, it's the way that

we do it, how to recognize manipulative tactics.

So it's not counter narrative.

It doesn't work on ideology.

It works on tactics and strategies as really good evidence that in videos as short as 30

seconds, you can show people how manipulation works and ways that cause them to be more

skeptical of the content that they receive and to reject the propaganda as well as the

group that produces it.

We also made this longer video, an animated video about the Boogaloo, which I highly recommend.

The Boogaloo Ballad is not a pre-bunking technique.

We did that with the Bertelsmann Foundation.

The reason why I highly recommend it is because it's actually a really good video.

The animators got so into the project, sorry, my watch thinks I'm talking to it.

They got so into the project that they went into much more detail and it ended up getting

picked up as an official selection of the American documentary and animated film festival.

So it's a good, good quality video, but it's 11 minutes long.

So like, what are you going to do with an 11 minute video?

It's not, you know, it's too long for social media.

So we then created an education guide so that people can use it as a tool in the classroom.

I still teach with it.

It's a few years old now, but it's a really good video that explains sort of how a person

could go down the rabbit hole of getting into the Boogaloo scene.

So we also have a large project on college campuses, which again, I'll skip through,

but just to say that college campuses, unlike your college campuses, I don't think you've

been struggling in the same way with these issues, but the college campuses become a

real site of target, both for far-right propaganda and fomenting of violence and a lot of expensive

damage and a lot of expensive security concerns.

Of course, Charlottesville Unite the Right itself was on a college campus.

So that's the type of thing, but also right now, the number of hate crimes happening on

college campuses in the last three weeks is really, really high.

So and the last thing I'll say is just that we in the lab are really committed to trying

to have more dialogue about these issues.

I, over the last five or six years, especially six, seven years, get invited all the time

by intelligence and security agencies to explain things in ways that are in rooms with a lot

of different countries represented and that are so helpful to learn and to share what's

happening within far-right youth culture.

And that almost never happens with prevention practitioners, especially not with, it only

happens in Germany.

Let me say this.

The only place it's ever happened is in Germany.

And it's because the Bundesentralie für Politische Büllnung often invites people together across

borders and brings practitioners to the room, but it never happens in other countries, including

mine.

I've only once in the hundreds and hundreds of presentations I've been in in the US, only

once been in a room where there was one social worker, and she wasn't a social worker anymore.

So I sort of make this point, and then somebody came up, I used to be a social worker, but

now I work in security.

And so it's fine.

We need the security sector, but it's like that's the only solution in the States and

it has been the only solution.

So we've been really trying to push for more global dialogue about this and how it works.

And one of the things we do is get some of our funders to also translate and adapt tools

upon requests.

So we've had requests in Portuguese to help the parents and caregivers tool in particular,

help some of the information get, it's because it's about the online context.

It's not quite as nationally specific as some of the other things that we do.

We also are really keen to diversify the field.

So the field of prevention in the US has been almost entirely dominated by white men who

used to be in law enforcement.

It just is, that's the way it is.

It's like they retire from law enforcement, they go into prevention.

And then the lenses through which you see the problem are about securitizing.

So like barricading the doors of the synagogue or locking the doors of a church before that

becomes the kind of idea of prevention.

So we are committed to bringing different personal, professional, disciplinary backgrounds

into the conversations.

And so our lab has social workers, mental health counselors, media communication specialists.

We have a former diplomat, we have educators, former teachers, I'm a sociologist, we have

an anthropologist, a psychologist.

So it's not that we wouldn't hire someone from the security sector, but they'd have

to really demonstrate that they understood what we meant by primary prevention and are

committed to that idea.

And so we can go one more.

That's just a lot of links.

I'm hardly ever on Twitter anymore.

I still have, I know it's called X, but I refuse to put X, I can't do it.

But I used to be quite active on Twitter and I probably, at some point, I'll find another

social media platform, but all these other links.

Our tools, PERL Research is probably the most important one, are all free.

And so they're tools, they're all free and they're all evidence-based.

So you can see our testing, how we test them, what the pre- and post-test looks like, what

the comparison and control groups look like on the videos.

And you're welcome to access any of it.

And if you have questions, we can be reached at perl@american.edu.

So that was sort of a blend of my own research and what the lab is doing, but hopefully enough

to generate some questions.

I'm happy to answer anything.

Thank you.

[applause]

[end of transcript]