I was looking for more information on how the right wing recruit people for a post I'm still working on when I found an article that cited research by Strathearn and Berger that found that Extremist groups consist of:
- 90 percent are lurkers and rarely contribute,
- 9 percent contribute some of the time,
- 1 percent do most of the talking and effectively control the conversation. [wired]
They claimed that was "good news" because they claim that it is good news because:
“They are casually involved, dabbling in extremism, and their rhetoric has a relatively minimal relationship to the spread of pernicious ideologies and their eventual metastasization into real-world violence.” [wired]
Authoritarian Followers
But what that tells me is that extremists are a hierarchy. That 90% may be “casually involved” now, but this very attitude is what is described when Altemeyer and others' describe "Authoritarian followers." If you measured their psychological attributes you'd find that each and every one of those 90% who lurk, are "authoritarian followers" and so are maybe the other 5% who participate. Authoritarian groups organize around followers who have authoritarian traits. The Social Dominators, the top 1% and some of the top 9%, that Strathearn describes queue up into a pecking order organized around systematic bullying and gaslighting. That 90% of true believers don't need to be bullied much, they are easily told what to think! They may be quiet and uninvolved now, but these are the people who will go to war on orders, against the "establishment."
That article didn't answer the question of "how far Right wing Extremists recruit" at all. Instead it alarmed me further.
So what Recruits people into Extremism?
Well it turns out that what recruits the right, also recruits the left, it is the spreading of grevience, a sense of victimization. Both Articles agree on this:
“All of these extremist groups promote an agenda that focuses on fighting those who are victimizing them and that resonates with these individuals who all believe that they have personally been victimized in their own lives,” [wired] [Similar to ISIS]
But how do they recruit people and then indoctrinate them into joining fascist and proto-fascist mass movements? Well Recruiters look for people “falling off the grid”, well the author cites the expert Finkelstein who says:
“When you see someone falling off the grid, what happens is they have less and less connection to what you and I know as reality. They become more and more connected to other people who fall off the grid. And that’s why it’s not a surprise that when you got nothing you end up in some, you know, skinhead Aryan Nazi hate-Jew group. So it fits the picture that everybody should have seen here”
So cult, extremist, fanatic recruiters look for people who seem lost, who are “falling off the grid” and then seek to give them what they know they are missing, while all the while giving them a narrative, with anecdotal validation that supplies targets and validation that those targets are who are responsible for the pain, fear, loneliness and isolation they feel. They give them love, while teaching them hate! As Cohen of the Anti-Defamation league notes, they fill the "hole in the souls" of recruits with a promise that, if you
“join our cause, you will be a part of our family and your life will have meaning.”
Recruiters do that everywhere. What makes RW recruitment evil is that the “family” they join is also indoctrinating them with hate, scapegoats for their problem, and usually telling them to trust the person “giving them so much love” against any contradictory evidence. These folks will be Conditioned to focus on the love messages and to repress the painful bullying that their "lover" [leader] beats them with. Even people who weren't already authoritarian come out of such a mixed messaging conditioning as described by Altemeyer or by people debriefing Nazis, ISIS, Fascists, Bolsheviks, or any member of a cult or terrorist group! Unfortunately similar methods are used by mainstream cults!
Share the Love and the hate!
Narcissists, terrorist recruiters, KKK recruiters, they all will "give you love" when they are recruiting you. They also will beat you, harass you and brainwash you into thinking that the logic of their cause is worth dying, and killing innocent people for.
Combating Terrorism means also sharing the Love
The trouble with terrorism, is that hate messages are incompatible with genuine love and family. A Narcissistic leader can't love. He can pretend to love, but it is a counterfeit act. Terrorist groups may make people feel part of a family, but that family will have narcissistic leaders and be held together as much by beatings and bullying as by the love they profess. A cult differs from a healthy spiritual group for the same reason. There is something ill, unwholesome, broken – about any group that is built on resentment, a sense of victimhood and professing violence against other people. That "hole in the soul" becomes a black hole that sucks up spiritual health and vacuums a person's soul away.
So of course, when we are fighting back against extremist groups in power, we are trying to recruit people with similar profiles to those recruited by the extremists, or who currently fill their loneliness and misery with "love" from those who can't love them back. When we are dealing with such people, they will be in extreme denial. Once they've made other extremists their family they won't be stopped until they realize they've been conned. And that means we have to resist and stop them from spreading their grievances. Maybe we can do so by showing them what love really looks like. But it is difficult precisely because mob members always seem to love one another.
So share the love, but don't counter victimhood by mirroring it. They think that they are the victims. Let's show them how to have a successful politics and political movement!
The reason why extremist groups want to break "the establishment" is that they know, that as long as their marks don't see the connection between their subversive behavior and the resulting dysfunction, they will recruit them despite having broken the service or resource that is missing from the recruits life. They also engage in and encourage the very corruption they preach against, in secret, so their followers won't catch on to the very real grifting that all authoritarian leaders engage in! Corruption feeds terrorism, and corruption breeds terrorists. And the best answer to terrorism is a well functioning government that benefits everyone.
Post Script
The right is also recruiting people another way. Since they only need one highly active person to recruit hundreds of angry followers, all they need to do is to:
“Pay them!”
That might not work on Authoritarian Followers, but the EMAD (Exploitive, Manipulative, Amoral and Dishonest) folks who lead and drive authoritarian movements are very transactional. The right pays them! That explains black folks shilling for a racist SOB and Jews promoting Nazi tropes. They get paid to.
I wanted to get these thoughts down while they were still fresh.
Sources and Further reading
- Wired Article: How Far Right Extremists Recruit on Twitter
- https://www.wired.com/2013/03/twitter-extremists/
- Better from ABC News: Recruiting is similar to ISIS:
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/hate-groups-similar-online-recruiting-methods-isis-experts/story?id=53528932
- My Posts on the subject:
- http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/01/understanding-social-dominance-theory.html
- https://www.academia.edu/954487/A_Proposed_Measure_of_Social_Dominance_Orientation_in_Children
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