Researchers shift tactics to tackle extremism

Rebecca Kasen has seen and heard things in recent years in and around Michigan’s capital city that she never would have expected. “It’s a very weird time in our lives,” said Kasen, executive director of the Women’s Center of Greater Lansing. Last November, a group of people were captured on surveillance video early one morning mocking a “Black Lives Matter” sign in the front window of the centre, with one of them vandalising its free pantry. That same fall, Women’s Center staff reported being harassed.

A couple of blocks down East Michigan Avenue, Strange Matter Coffee, which supports progressive causes in the community, has been confronted by “First Amendment auditors” outside its storefront. Some toted guns or cameras, sometimes chanting slogans supporting President Donald Trump, generally unnerving customers and staff, Kasen said.

In many cases, extremist activities and conduct throughout the US over the past few years have been driven by the deepening chasm of political partisanship and disinformation-driven rebellion against responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, backlash against immigration and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives has heightened tensions.

Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 1,371 hate and extremist groups nationwide sowing unrest through a wide range of tactics, sometimes violent. Over the last several years, the group writes, the political right has increasingly shifted toward “an authoritarian, patriarchal Christian supremacy dedicated to eroding the value of inclusive democracy and public institutions.”

Researchers at American University’s Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, or PERIL, say that in online spaces, “hate is intersectional.” (For example, Pasha Dashtgard, PERIL’s director of research, explains, platforms dedicated to male supremacy are often also decidedly antisemitic.) Seemingly innocuous discussions erupt into vitriol: The release of “A Minecraft Movie” prompted tirades against an alleged trend toward casting Black women and nonbinary people. The continued escalations drove staffers at PERIL and the Southern Poverty Law Center to approach the problem from a different angle: Treat extremism as a public health problem. Community Advisory, Resource, and Education Centers are now operating in Lansing, Michigan, and Athens, Georgia, offering training, support, referrals, and resources to communities affected by hate, discrimination, and supremacist ideologies and to people susceptible to radicalisation, with a focus on young people.

The team defines extremism as the belief that one’s group is in direct and bitter conflict with another of a different identity — ideology, race, gender identity or expression — fomenting an us-versus-them mentality mired in the conviction that resolution can come only through separation, domination, or extermination.

Researchers who study extremism say that, as the federal government terminates grants for violence prevention, state governments and local communities are recognising they’re on their own. (CARE receives no federal funding.) Aaron Flanagan, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s deputy director of prevention and partnerships, said his organisation and PERIL came together about five years ago to examine a shared research question: What would it take to create a nationally scalable model to prevent youth radicalisation, one that’s rooted in communities and provides solutions residents trust?

They looked to a decades-old German counterextremism model called mobile advisory centres. The objective is to equip “all levels of civil society with the skills and knowledge to recognise extremism” and to engage in conversations about addressing it, Dashtgard said. “We’re not about, ‘How do you respond to a group of Patriot Front people marching through your town?’” Pete Kurtz-Glovas, who until June served as PERIL’s deputy director of regional partnerships, explained during a training in January. “Rather, ‘How do you respond when your son or a member of your congregation expresses some of these extremist ideas?’”

Michigan has long been considered fertile ground for extremism. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, convicted of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, were associated with a militia group in the state. Some of the men charged in 2020 in the plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had ties to a militia group calling itself the Wolverine Watchmen. The state’s capital city and adjacent East Lansing, where Michigan State University is, are relatively progressive but have seen conflict. Will Verchereau has a vivid recollection from the early days of the pandemic: a pickup truck speeding down the street in their Lansing neighbourhood, a Confederate flag flying from it, music blasting, later joining a rolling protest that clogged streets around the Capitol to protest Whitmer’s COVID lockdown directives.