Cries of “Nazis, go home!” and “Shame! Shame!” filled the air as Angela King and Tony McAleer stood with other counterprotesters at the “free speech” rally in Boston two weekends ago.
They didn’t join the shouting. Their sign spoke for them: “There is life after hate.”
They know because McAleer and King were once young extremists themselves, before they co-founded the nonprofit Life After Hate to help former white supremacists restart their lives. To hear them talk about their pasts hints at what may be in the minds of those inside the far-right fringe groups whose actions have ignited raw, angry passions across the country. What are people thinking when they spew hate? Are they all true believers? What’s more, how does someone get that way?
Hate groups in the U.S. number 917 and have been on the rise for two years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. It attributes the trend partly to the attention given to extremist views during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Those who study human behavior attribute hate speech more to deep personality issues than to a diagnosable mental illness. But they’re also intrigued by how the white supremacy movement is rebranding itself for the 21st century. The well-known racist symbols of white robes and hoods or shaved heads and torches have given way to a clean-cut subtlety for the millennial generation.
Young people with a troubled past are especially vulnerable, said psychologist Ervin Staub, of Holyoke, Mass., a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who studies social processes that lead to violence.
A 2015 report from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (known as START) found that former members of violent white supremacist groups showed almost half (45 percent) reporting being the victim of childhood physical abuse and about 20 percent reporting being the victim of childhood sexual abuse.
The study by sociologist Pete Simi of Chapman University in Orange, Calif., suggests that influences on these followers may be related more to the group’s social bonds than ideology.