Revisiting the White Boys From Portland to Ukraine: Anomie and Right-Wing Extremism

Right-Wing Extremism Trends in the 2020s

In the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and the transition from Trump to Biden administrations, right-wing extremist activity began to receive more attention. Militia groups, like Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, as well as the Proud Boys, were visible agitators in the Capitol attack. In a 2022 report, the Center for Strategic and International Studies identified 2020 and 2021 as peak years for domestic terrorist attacks, with 73 plots and attacks, responsible for 35 fatalities (CSIS, 2022). The report locates the majority of those attacks in and around Portland, Oregon. A March 2022 report from the Oregon Secretary of State identified Oregon as ranking sixth in the nation with regard to violent extremist attacks (and Washington as fifth). While a significant number of the incidents counted were left-wing in nature, the majority of cases were clear examples of right-wing extremism, including the December 21, 2020, attack on the Oregon Capitol Building.

Similarly, the late 2010s saw a dramatic spike in reported hate crimes. After several years of decline, reported hate crimes bottomed out in 2014 (5479 hate crime incidents reported to the FBI Uniform Crime Report), the number of reports jumped dramatically, hitting 7700 in 2020, the highest level in 14 years (Carrega & Krishnakumar, 2021). Much of the increase was attributed to the combination of impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and cultural shifts in the acceptance of bias in the wake of President Trump’s rhetoric and policies. This was evident in the rise in hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans (illustrated by Trump’s repeated reference to COVID-19 as the “China virus”) and the involvement of right-wing extremist groups in the anti-lockdown protests around the country. The extremist climate was most dramatically played out in the alleged 2021 plot by four militia members to kidnap and execute Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in response to her state-wide lockdown order. (A jury acquitted two of the men and was deadlocked on the remaining men in April 2022).

The resurgent threat of right-wing extremists has seen some corresponding responses from federal institutions. This includes the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, signed into law by President Biden on May 20, 2021, intended to make reporting of hate crimes easier in the wake of the wave of anti-Asian attacks. The same month, the Department of Homeland Security established the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3). CP3’s mandate was to give the agency more resources to combat hate crimes (as “targeted violence”) and domestic terrorism. In January 2022, the Justice Department created a unit to fight domestic terrorism (Benner, 2022). Prior to the Biden Administration’s actions, the state of Oregon passed an innovative bias crime law in 2019 that created a state reporting hotline and mandated a victim-centered, trauma-informed response from law enforcement officials.

The current landscape has seen a morphing of the threat from right-wing extremists that have rebranded the 20th century visions of a racial civil war to restore white hegemony, then referred to as Rahowa (Racial Holy War), as the more internet meme-friendly “Boogaloo.” The endgame remains the same, to turn the tides against the social and demographic changes that have worked to dethrone cis-gendered heterosexual, white Christian men from the throne of Western nations’ social hierarchy. This shift in language, but not broad agenda, allows us to revisit the five key trends addressed in the 2001 article.

1. Consolidation: The trend toward consolidation of groups reversed in the new century, largely tied to the 2008 election of Barack Obama. The Southern Poverty Law Center counted a low number of anti-government groups in 2000 (266) and of hate groups in 2000 (602). In 2020, the SPLC counted 488 anti-government groups and 733 hate groups. Like the “merger-madness” in the private sector that characterized the 1990s, the 2000s and 2010s saw a wave of new “startups” in the field of right-wing extremists, including incels, new anti-immigrant groups, Patriot Front, and the Proud Boys.

These five trends have created more challenges for law enforcement, civil rights groups, and monitoring organizations. The fringe world of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and anti-government militias that had identifiable groups with membership rosters made the boundaries between mainstream culture and extremist subcultures easier to delineate. Chip Berlet and Stanislav Vytsotsky made the case in 2006, that it better served analysis to refer to the radical right milieu as a counterculture instead of a movement, with more elements that divided it than united it as a coherent social movement (Berlet & Vysotsky, 2006).

This is, even more, the case in the 2020s as the boundaries between extremists and non-extremists become even more fluid. While more traditional groups, like the Oath Keepers, continue to maintain membership rolls, right-wing extremists are now more likely to hang out in common spaces online. For most that will be the extent of their engagement with extremist activities. Evidence of this fact is the finding that of the initial 650 people charged in the January 6 Capitol riot, 77 had ties to known extremist groups, primarily the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters. However, 573 had no ties to any known extremist group (Weiner et al., 2021). The ability to identify the “usual suspects” and those at risk of extremist violence is undermined by the lack of boundaries in the political fringe. The political fringe and mainstream political discourse have great overlaps that follow an, as of yet, unmeasured, path from armchair conservative, to alt-right activist, to “Boogaloo Boi.”

Proud Boys as Terrorist Men

Groups like the Proud Boys have framed themselves as “patriots,” a “fighting club,” and “Western chauvinists,” working to preserve “western culture,” which implies white European-American culture. (The hip-hop culture of the American west coast is not included in their description of western culture.) The clownish nature of the Proud Boys is countered by the fact that 6 members of the Proud Boys (along with 11 members of the Oath Keepers) have been indicted for their role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Reporting has revealed that Oath Keepers and Proud Boys discussed security details with Trump associates prior to the January 6 vote (Cheney, 2022). The role of these groups in what has been described as an “insurrection” and a “coup attempt” follows the role that right-wing groups have played in fomenting social upheaval and an imagined second American revolution or civil war.

After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, scholars began to pay a lot more attention to patriot militias. One of the waves of books that followed the attack, which killed 168 people, was Kenneth Stern’s A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (1997). Stern utilized the militia funnel created by Ken Toole of the Montana Human Rights Network. The militia funnel became increasingly useful in understanding the right-wing counterculture in the Trump Era.

• At the top level of the funnel exists several issues where conservatives find common ground, including gun rights, tax protests, and land use regulations. People’s first contact with patriot groups is often while rallying around these types of “Don’t tread on me” issues. This was seen in 2016 when the armed “Bundy militia” took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Oregon in a dispute over grazing rights on open land.

There are fewer and fewer militia activists the farther you descend the funnel. However, Stern posits that the more folks who come in at the top on broad issues, like Second Amendment gun rights, the more who will make it down to the revolutionary bottom where events like the Oklahoma City bombing are viewed as legitimate action to violently overthrow the evil federal government.

In the Trump era, Toole’s militia funnel was infused with new elements. At the top level, pandemic lockdown orders served to reinvigorate patriot groups and bring the mainstream public into contact with their anti-government beliefs, carrying them down to the second level of the funnel. Social media, Alex Jones, and the QAnon movement expanded the reach of conspiracy theories at the next level of the funnel and many of those theories quickly became anti-Semitic in nature, including the belief that Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci is an agent of ZOG and that the COVID vaccine is a plot to implant non-Jews with tracking devices (Klepper & Hinnant, 2021). At the bottom of the funnel, the racist revolution has been recast as the Boogaloo, a civil war to be waged by Oath Keepers and internet trolls.

COVID, Trump’s rhetoric, and the expansion of social media utilization have not altered the end game of the extremist right. The playbook remains the 1978 novel, The Turner Diaries, written by neo-Nazi William Pierce. The futuristic fantasy of a race war waged by “racial patriots,” was utilized by Timothy McVeigh in the planning of the Oklahoma City Bombing and many of its themes, including the “Day of Ropes” in which racial traitors are hung, were present at the January 6 Capitol attack (Alter, 2021). The vision of a race war, now reframed as the Boogaloo, includes the collapse of democratic government and the creation of a white ethnostate.

The shift from “white supremacy” to “white nationalism” as the orienting frame of the racist right has reflected this emphasis on the strategy to Balkanize the United States. Additionally, the rhetoric around “accelerationism” views social chaos as a means of hastening social collapse, which would open the door for white authoritarian rule, increasingly modeled after Putin’s Russia. Accelerationists saw value in participating in the social justice protests of 2020, including in Portland, Oregon, to drain resources and contribute to the belief in the cultural decline of America. In February 2021, a member of the Boogaloo movement told Salon, "Right now it’s about provoking BLM, Antifa, and militias or Three Percenters into engaging in violence that will provoke disproportionate police response, which can be used to fuel further unrest” (Sollenberger, 2021).

Strain Theory and the Alt-Right

The original skinhead study identified anomie as not only a social force driving young white males into hate groups but also a tool by which hate groups identified likely candidates for recruitment. The first field study, based on interviews and observations with 33 skinheads in Orlando, Florida, found racist skinheads responding to the rapid pace of the deindustrialization of the American labor force and the downward mobility that accompanied it. Traditional hate groups, like the White Aryan Resistance, provided these young people with the analysis of the changing economic system that blamed a range of social phenomena, from Affirmative Action to factory closings, on an international Jewish conspiracy to displace ethnic whites. Such groups also provided the response to “solve” the problem in the form of hate crimes and “Rahowa.” As the study expanded to include interviews with racist skinheads across the United States and Europe, the anomie was more broadly identified as social changes that were challenging power connected more to maleness than whiteness.

Informed by Durkheim’s concept of anomie, Robert Merton (1938) developed the first version of strain theory, exploring how crime is expected to result when legitimate cultural means are unavailable or blocked to those who adhere to the common cultural goals. In effect, the lack of means to achieve cultural goals is a form of anomie, and that blockage produces strain. Crime becomes an illegitimate means to achieve the goal. Cohen (1955) identified how criminal subcultures emerge to resolve the anomie. Later, researchers like Robert Agnew (1992) and Messner and Rosenfeld (1994) added to the discussion about the sources of strain and the types of crimes that can be driven by cultural anomie. The concept of anomie from rapid social change creating strain resulting in subcultural criminality became a key frame of analysis in understanding the violent behavior of racist skinheads (Blazak, 1998).

Looking at the social landscape at the beginning of the 21st century, four sources of strain (framed as “threats”) were identified as drivers into the racist skinhead subculture:

1. Threats to ethnic or racial status

• growth in the minority student population

Twenty years later these sources of strain have only magnified. The demographic changes in the country have included a shrinking of the white population (Frey, 2020). In 2000, whites made up 75.1% of the U.S. population. The 2020 census revealed the white population had shrunk to only 61.6% of the population, leading demographers to predict that by 2045 (if not before), whites will make up less than 50% of the American population. Even though the African-American population also declined (12.9% of the population in 2000 and 12.4% in 2020), much of the push back against demographic trends targeted the black population, including hate crimes, the backlash against Black Lives Matter activism (framed as “All Lives Matter”), and campaigns against Critical Race Theory. The 2022 targeted violence in Buffalo, New York, specifically focused on black victims, leaving 10 dead.

Threats to male gender status have also intensified. In 2021, women made up 57.8% of the workforce, displacing the “man as breadwinner” norm that characterized much of the 20th century (BJS, 2021.) The #metoo movement, launched online in 2017 after the sexual assault victims of Hollywood producers began to come forward, created a wider public conversation about sexual predation and challenged men’s claims to women’s and girls’ bodies. The backlash against empowered women in the 2000s was witnessed in the hyper-masculine rhetoric of the Trump campaign, including his comments about Fox News host Megyn Kelly. How Trump and his supporters framed campaign rival Hillary Clinton was routinely steeped in sexism, including campaign materials that made statements like, “Don’t be a pussy. Vote for Trump in 2016,” “Trump 2016: Finally, someone with balls,” “Trump that bitch,” and “Hillary sucks but not like Monica,” (Robbins, 2017). The misogynistic backlash was also violently represented in new groups like the Proud Boys, whose claims included “venerating the housewife,” and the incel movement, who have been tied to at least eight mass murders since 2014, all targeting women (Hoffman et al., 2020).

The threat to heterosexual status morphed into a gender identity debate. The waning of the AIDS crisis and the broader acceptance was seen in the shift of support for same-sex marriage rights. The “gay threat” certainly motivated the right, including in the case of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, and the 2022 passage of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, also in Florida. However, the Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015 was a reflection of changing social attitudes around sexual orientation. For many on the right, the target shifted to transgender adults and children. Hate crimes against transgender people spiked with 2021 being the deadliest year for trans people, according to a report by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC, 2022). According to the FBI UCR, the number of reported anti-homosexual hate crimes declined slightly in the first 20 years of the century (2000 - 1299 incidents, 2019 - 1195 incidents). However, reported hate crimes based on gender identity spiked. In 2013, the first year the FBI tracked gender identity as a protected status, there were 31 reported incidents. In 2019, that number jumped to 198 reported incidents. The trend in anti-trans hate crimes is mirrored in the dozens of states, like Texas, that have passed various anti-transgender bills.

As was the case at the turn of the century, economic factors often drive social anxieties. In 2001, the concern was still rooted in the effects of deindustrialization, and how the conditions of a post-industrial economy had replaced the security of unionized factory work with low-wage service sector work. Two decades later, we have entered a post-post-industrial work landscape, where “gig economy” jobs have rapidly replaced even low-wage service industry jobs. Accelerated by the pandemic, the move of workers into positions where they are contractors instead of employees has further blocked the upward mobility required to achieve the economic status central to the American Dream. The GM autoworker became a Walmart clerk and is now delivering food for Uber Eats. The range of gig work runs from Airbnb landlords to skilled consultants, but all exist without the annual salaries that have been a staple of middle-class stability. A 2021 Pew Research Center study found that 16% of Americans had earned an income through an online gig platform, like Uber (Pew, 2021). The growth of the wealth gap during deindustrialization was blamed, by hate mongers, on the international cabal of Jewish financiers in the late 20th century. The further economic displacement due to the new gig workforce that has created a “servant economy” has also been blamed on Jews and was mentioned in the manifest of the 19-year-old neo-Nazi who attacked the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, California, shooting four people and killing one. A 2022 ADL report highlighted a dramatic spike in anti-Semitic incidents in 2021 (2717 reports), many referencing the conspiracy theories that assert Jews wield control over the economy (ADL, 2022b, 2022a).

The anomie that characterized the activism of the extreme right 20 years ago on all four fronts, racial/ethnic, gender, sexuality, and economic, has accelerated in the new century. While the problem, the inability to manage rapid social change, remains the same, the landscape of those providing extremist solutions has changed. In the 20th century, those offering pathways through the extremist world toward “Rahowa” were largely relegated to rural patriot militias, localized hate groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, Aryan Nations, and racist skinheads, and Tom Metzger’s cable access TV show, Race and Reason. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, calls for violent racism and misogyny, and alarms that white Americans are being “replaced” are now common narratives from the expansive megaphone of social media to mainstream news programs. The most-watched program on cable news is Tucker Carlson Tonight (3.4 million viewers). Carlson regularly entertains his audience with white supremacist diatribes about immigrants, Black Lives Matter protestors, and the media control of George Soros. What has been labeled as “the most racist show in the history of cable news” by the New York Times (Confessore, 2022), echoes the racist and fascist broadcasts of Father Coughlin in the 1930s. Payton Gendron, the racist shooter who killed 10 in a Buffalo, New York grocery store in 2022, published a manifesto referencing the white replacement theory that stated the cultural replacement of whites and Critical Race Theory were part of a global Jewish plot to harm white status (Collins, 2022). Numerous pages of the manifesto are dedicated to anti-Semitic screeds, including Gendron’s belief that “The Jews are responsible for many problems that we in the western world face today.”

Similarities With Cults

The original “White Boys” piece explored the similarity between the patterns of racist skinhead recruitment and that of religious cults, addressed by academic research. These similarities continue to be present two decades later. This includes countless explorations of the personality cult of Donald Trump in both the academic literature (e.g., “Trump: The cult of personality, anti-intellectualism and the Post-Truth era” (Reyes, 2020)) and in mainstream publishing (e.g., The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control (Hassa, 2019)). Citing Robert Cialdini’s (1993) book Influence: Science and Practice, the original research referenced six tools utilized in cult recruitment that has echoes in the contemporary alt-right and militia subcultures.

1. The Rule of Reciprocity: Cult and skinhead leaders would perform favors, like protection, for (larger) favors to be repaid as signs of loyalty. The decentralized nature of the current hate movement doesn’t mandate the same levels of reciprocity but it is clearly evident in racist prison gangs, like the Aryan Brotherhood and European Kindred (Blazak, 2009). Reciprocity is also implied in the “gamification” tactic that has become central in anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic attacks, with the promise of glory for attackers of specific targets. Examples include Patrick Crusius (El Paso shooting, 2019), John Earnest (Poway shooting, 2019), Brenton Tarrant (Christchurch shooting, 2019), Robert Bowers (Pittsburgh shooting, 2018), and Anders Breivik (Oslo shooting and bombing, 2011) have been mentioned in the “manifestos” of other shooters, including by Payton Gendron (Buffalo shooting, 2022), and are named frequently in online forums as heroes of the racist cause.

Because of the increasing fractures within the extreme right, which includes structured groups like the Oath Keepers, and “lone wolves,” like Dylan Roof, the cult comparisons are not as straightforward as they were 20 years ago. However, the flow of polarizing information, particularly through the very cult-like QAnon movement, and the presence of a unifying charismatic leader in the form of Donald Trump has continued the utility of research on cult dynamics present in the extreme right.

Generation Z and Interstitial Youth

The significant size of the generations born in the last decades of the 20th and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries (commonly referred to as Millennials and Generation Z) have provided a source of revitalization for the racist right. However, these generations are more racially and ethnically diverse. The Baby Boom generation is 76% white. The considerably larger Millennial generation is only 56% white (Pew, 2020). And Generation Z is estimated at only 50.9% white (Frey, 2019). These children of boomers, Gen Xers, and first-generation immigrants are more likely to identify as liberal and Democrat than older generations (Saad, 2019).

However, as was the case with the young people in the original study, there are still a significant number of “interstitial” white youth who are falling through the cracks of social change. They see inclusivity movements in their schools and the larger culture as providing status to marginalized groups at their expense. Without the proper historical context, Black History Month and Gay Pride, without the ability to celebrate “White History Month” and “Straight Pride,” seem unfair and marginalizing to dominant groups. In a post-President Obama and post-Will and Grace world, the needs of civil rights movements may seem, to them, resolved.

Reflecting this generational divide the right-wing counterculture seems to be skewing older. Most of the January 6 rioters were in their thirties and forties (two-thirds of those arrested were over 34 years old) (Ismail, 2022), with a dramatic absence of youth. There is still a need for youth recruitment to infuse the movement with vitality, relevance, and, in all seriousness, white females of reproductive age to shore up shrinking white populations.

Access to anomic white youth has shifted from the transit mall to the internet. Every level of the internet has been utilized by extremists to lure young people into the extremist web, including social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Gab, video sharing sites, like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, and communication platforms, like Telegram and Signal, and “grey web” discussion groups, like 4chan and 8kun. White supremacist websites have been replaced by discussion threads on reddit.com. And the overt racist hyperbola of neo-Nazi groups has been supplanted by the coy memes of the alt-right trolls of Kekistan (an imaginary nation created on 4chan). Activity in these areas ranges from “shitposting” (posts designed to challenge liberal social norms) to calls for sedition on sites like MyMilitia.com (Moonshot CVE, 2021). Payton Gendron, who killed 10 people in a grocery store in a predominately black neighborhood on May 14, 2022, live-streamed the racially-motivated attack on Twitch, the popular gaming platform.

The social isolation created by the pandemic sent a large number of young people into the world of online gaming. The days of young people playing Street Racer against each other on an Atari console in their basement have given way to players engaged with opponents across the globe in games like Crossfire, Minecraft, and Fortnite, and participating in real-time chats while playing. Already an exploding phenomenon among youth, the number of people participating in online gaming was estimated to be over 2.8 billion in 2021 (Holding, 2021). While China is home to the largest segment of online gamers, an estimated 200 million Americans are regular online players (Holding, 2021). Many of these are white youth navigating social and economic changes in a COVID-era culture.

The Gamergate controversy of 2014, in which female gamers and game reviewers were threatened with misogynistic calls of violence opened the door for extremist groups to invade online gaming platforms, like Steam, Discord, and Roblox (Dodds, 2022). Hate groups, like Patriot Front, soon began using the online chat feature on gaming platforms to push messages about “reclaiming America,” appearing to be in line with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign motto. A 2021 report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that when many mainstream web hosting services began to deplatform hate sites and disinformation sources, right-wing activists discovered the unregulated world of online gaming (ISD, 2021). Deplatforming, for example, the removal of Stormfront.org from Network Solutions in 2017 and the removal of Alex Jones’s Info Wars from YouTube in 2018, created a game of “Whack-A-Mole” as extremists tried to find web hosts willing to support their content. Online gaming provided direct access to youth, struggling with remote education and downward mobility accelerated by the pandemic. The Extremism and Gaming Research Network (EGRN) found right-wing groups and terrorist organizations using gaming platforms to radicalize increasingly younger players and engage them in activities like building concentration camps and instigating mass shooting events (ISD, 2021).

Global Nationalism, Nazis, and the Ukraine War

The beginning of the 20th century saw the rhetoric of globalization intensify as the offshoring of the American labor base seemed to continue unabated. The “American Century,” which was characterized by the economic dominance of the United States after the first world war, was winding down and China appeared ascendant as the new global hegemon. In the wake of the economic impact of the COVID pandemic, particularly on China, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the language of “deglobalization” has grown (Irwin, 2022). As nations wean themselves from Chinese supply chains and Russian oil exports, self-reliance replaces interdependence. A similar trend in the globalized white supremacist movement has seen shifts back towards racialized nationalist movements. However, there is still momentum behind global connections around anti-leftist white identity movements.

At the turn of the century, one of the emerging issues was how the civil war in Yugoslavia had infused global extremists with an active model of racial nationalism. Many of the racist skinheads interviewed during that period, starting with skinheads in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1993 and ending with Portland skinheads in the 2000s, looked to Serbian nationalism as a playbook for Rahowa. The ethnic Balkanization of Yugoslavia, which ceased to be a nation in 2002, was viewed as replicable in the United States, or possibly in the Pacific Northwest under the framework of the “Northwest Imperative.” The flow of hate rock bands and music back and forth from Europe added to the perception there was a growing international white supremacist movement. Volksfront, the skinhead group, born in Portland, Oregon in 1994, rebranded itself as Volksfront International in 2001, claiming chapters in Germany, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Spain. In November 2001, white supremacist icon David Duke traveled to Russia to promote the growing call in the white supremacist movement that Jews and non-white immigrants threaten both white Americans and Europeans and therefore unite racist nationalist causes (CBS, 2001). In 2004, Duke described Russia as the “key to white survival” (Arsenault & Stabile, 2020).

The role of Russian disinformation campaigns came to light in 2016 during the U.S. presidential election, including the promotion of right-wing extremist memes and talking points on social media. Two years before that, the Russian extremist group, Russkoe Imperskoe Dvizhenie (the Russian Imperial Movement or RIM) began training Russian nationalists in Eastern Ukraine to wage war on ethnic Ukrainians (Arsenault & Stabile, 2020). In 2015, RIM was designated as a terrorist organization by the United States government. In 2020, it was revealed that RIM had been providing military training to Atomwaffen, an American neo-Nazi group (Mehkennet & Weiner, 2020). Russian disinformation about fascist groups in the region resurfaced in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

On February 24, 2022, as Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine, the language of “Naziism” was injected into the wave of disinformation. Russian President Vladimir Putin justified the “special military option” by stating, "We will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine," and conscripted Russian soldiers were told they would liberate the country from fascists. The complex truth is that there has been a neo-Nazi presence in Ukraine. Ultranationalist paramilitary units, often with anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic elements, had been active in the Ukrainian National Guard, fighting Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. In 2014, Amnesty International accused the Aider Battalion of committing war crimes in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine (Amnesty International, 2014). The Azov Battalion, one of the more effective militias in the war with Russia, has been associated with white supremacist and neo-Nazi leanings and imagery. Before the invasion, the Asgardsrei festival, a celebration of white power music that attracted neo-Nazis from across Europe, was held annually in Kyiv. Although originating in Moscow, the festival organizer, Alexey Levkin, was also a member of the Azov Battalion (Hagen, 2019).

It’s worth acknowledging that every European nation, including Russia, has active white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and has family members who are among the 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews killed when the Nazis invaded Soviet Ukraine in 1941. On April 10, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden accused the Russian forces of acts of genocide and that Putin was attempting to “wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian.” On May 8, Zelensky accused Russia of committing “Nazi atrocities” in the wake of the killing of civilians in cities like Bucha and Mariupol (BBC, 2022).

In March 2022, wanting to better understand the truth about Nazis in Ukraine, I traveled to Poland and Ukraine to assess the extremist landscape. For 2 weeks, while I engaged in refugee resettlement, both in Poland and in Ukraine, I conducted numerous interviews, including with Polish police, international aid workers, refugees, and members of the Ukrainian military. These interviews included several with displaced Ukrainians in an air-raid shelter in Lviv as Russian jets screamed overhead. All participants downplayed the presence of neo-Nazis within Ukraine or traveling to Ukraine to join the fight on behalf of Ukraine. All framed Putin as the source of fascism, including his use of the Wagner Group, a mercenary group that promotes neo-Nazi ideologies and whose leader, Dmitry Utkin, sports swastika and German eagle tattoos (Soufan, 2022). Some comments included:

We haven’t seen any neo-Nazis traveling in to or out of Ukraine. We can’t run a background check on the ideology of everybody coming to Poland to fight for Ukraine, but there have been no reports of it. I suspect if there are any foreign fighters from the right (wing), they are on the Russian side (Police detective, interviewed in Krakow, Poland).

The issue of “Ukrainian Nazis,” mirrors the evolution of the far-right in the West. Eastern Europe has experienced the growth of nationalist anti-government militias, some with anti-Semitic ideologies, a spread of “lone wolf” extremists who are radicalized online, and national leaders (Trump, Putin, and others) who have emboldened their cause. As right-wing disinformation campaigns influenced the Normandale Park shooter in Portland, Oregon, so have they influenced those who support the genocidal violence against Ukrainians.

A Public Health Approach to Interrupting Violent Extremism

One thing that has changed in the last 20 years has been perspectives on best practices to prevent right-wing and extremist violence. At the turn of the century, the model was largely based on deterrence. The belief was that heightened coverage of law enforcement investigations of extremists and penalty enhancements for crimes that were charged as “hate crimes” would serve to deter rational actors from engaging in criminal forms of extremism. In many ways, these punitive approaches had the opposite effect. The 2001 execution of Timothy McVeigh provided the militia movement with a martyr and served to reinforce many anti-government conspiracy theories. This theme was repeated after the arrest and prosecution of many January 6th insurrectionists (Schnell, 2021). One January 6th participant, R Majewski, won the Republican primary for his Ohio congressional seat and others have been celebrated by former President Trump. Those sent to prison on hate crime charges often enter the world of organized racist prison gangs, like Aryan Brotherhood, and leave prison more committed to white supremacist violence than when they entered (Blazak, 2009).

The 21st century saw a shift towards Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs that tried to balance punitive approaches with community-based solutions. The Prevent Program in the UK and Obama’s CVE program both attempted to create holistic strategies that linked community groups, including local religious institutions, academics, and law enforcement agencies. However, the programs received criticism for engaging in profiling, especially in Muslim communities, and relying too heavily on the policing aspects of the partnerships (Brennan Center, 2019). In 2017, the Trump administration ended CVE programs that targeted white supremacist violence and renamed the program Countering Radical Islamic Extremism (CRIE). Extremist monitoring group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, warned of the growing risk of right-wing violence, citing the 2017 attack on a Portland commuter train that left two men dead (Beirich, 2017). Against the advice of academic and law enforcement experts, the Trump administration returned to the deterrent model with regard to jihadist violence and de-prioritized right-wing violence.

In 2021, federal authorities, particularly after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, shifted the focus back on domestic extremism, this time with a public health approach to countering violent extremism. With an eye to recent innovations in the UK’s Prevent program, as well as programs in other countries like New Zealand, the work of non-profits in the extremism field, like Cure Violence Global, and recent scholarship on pathways to recruitment in extremists groups (Miller-Idriss, 2020), the Biden Administration looked to locally-driven prevention programs. The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CPS), a program created by the Department of Homeland Security, promoted public health models to address extremist violence and has funded community groups developing local responses to extremist violence, including in Portland.

The public health approach views violence as a contagion following patterns similar to disease outbreaks. Akin to how a conflict between two gang members can escalate into a series of drive-by shootings, extremist violence can be carried from small conflicts to larger acts of targeted violence. This was in evidence during the Portland protests in the summer of 2020 when right-wing agitators began confronting Black Lives Matter protesters, leading to the shooting death of a Patriot Prayer member who charged an armed anti-racism activist. The public health approach to prevention relies, not on the deterrence of government sanctions, but on the actions of individuals credible to those at risk of choosing violent actions, like hate crimes or acts of terrorism. Essentially, individual actors, trusted by extremists capable of violence, provide non-violent choices and pull the individual back from the cliff of violent extremism. This model has been utilized to reduce gun violence between gang members in settings as diverse as Baltimore, Maryland, and Cali, Columbia (CVG, 2021). If this model had been used to interrupt the movement toward the violence of the shooter at Normandale Park in Portland, lives could have been saved. More encouraging are the global norm shifts that occurred after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that may serve to prevent the violence from spreading across Europe.

Looking to the White Boys Who Made It Out

We don’t know how many of the racist skinheads of the early 2000s, working toward their Rahowa, became the right-wing extremists of the 2020s, dreaming of their Boogaloo (although, in Portland, Oregon at least, some Antifa activists were SHARPs in the 1990s). We do know many of those skinheads have left the world of white supremacy to engage in work to lead other hate activists away from racist violence as credible messengers. One of those was notorious Philadelphia skinhead Frank Meeink, whom I was encouraged to meet while I was interviewing Chicago skinheads in the early 1990s. The images of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, committed by a fellow racist, so shook Meeink that he walked into an ADL office and began his work as an anti-racist activist. Meeink and five other extremists formed Life After Hate in 2010 to help people leave the counterculture of the far-right. In 2017, they were awarded a $400,000 grant by Obama’s CVE program to combat right-wing extremists. However, that grant was rescinded by the incoming Trump Administration (Tillett, 2017).

These “formers,” as they call themselves, are essentially field experts on how white boys become terrorist men. Several of the founders of Life After Hate have written memoirs about their paths in and out of extremism, including Meeink (Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, 2010), Arno Michaelis (My Life After Hate, 2010), and Christian Picciolini (Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism, 2020). Each of these stories tracks the trajectory of the young white men in my research, seeing the world around them rapidly changing and finding both explanations and solutions in the violent world of white supremacy. They were responding to the anomie in their environment with subcultural solutions, similar to the findings in Albert K. Cohen’s pioneering work, Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (1955).

The original “White Boys to Terrorist Men” article urged addressing the problem on two fronts. The first was to reduce the effect of cultural anomie by helping young people navigate the rapid pace of social change. Unfortunately, the forces that were driving the social change have only accelerated. Gender and demographic changes are compounded by shifting social media norms and the movement into a less stable economy, magnified by an extended pandemic. This work can be done but works against the increasing political polarization that pushes the dichotomous vision of the American political landscape. (As a Proud Boy told me in 2021, “You are either against Critical Race Theory or you are for it.”) The second front was to keep an eye on the global trends but focus actions on local problems. There is a connection between the war in Ukraine and the Patriot Front vandalizing George Floyd murals in Portland, Oregon (Smith, 2021), but the work itself is local. Here, the public health approach to interrupting extremist violence offers great opportunities. By identifying “credible messengers” who can reach those most at risk of engaging in violence, de-escalation can occur, potentially reducing hate crimes and acts of terrorism intended to start a second civil war.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s hugely popular campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” implied that America was not currently great. In 2016, a New York Times reporter asked Trump when America was last great and he replied that it was the “late 40s and 50s” (Haberman & Sanger, 2016). The question was specifically about trade policy but many who didn’t read the New York Times piece took the answer as reflective of a narrative in radical right that America was last great in the mid-twentieth century. This idealized “pre-hippie” period was when Jim Crow was at its segregationist peak, before gains made by the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and the disability rights movement. This was the period before Roe v. Wade, transgender bathrooms, and black lives mattering. This was the last period in history that the confirmed authority of straight white cis-gendered Christian men went unchallenged. For many, Trump represented a way of reducing the anomie, returning the country to a simpler time when there were only two genders and a clear racial hierarchy. In one political campaign cycle, he managed to mainstream the messages the white supremacist underground had been advancing for decades, complete with the cult-like subscriptions to xenophobia conspiracy theories about a “Chinese virus” and a “Hispanic invasion.” It should not be surprising to find direct links between these words and hate crimes against Asian-Americans and the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso that left 23 Latinx people dead, making it America’s single largest hate crime. The rise in popularity of ethno-nationalist leaders around the world, including in France (Le Pen), Spain (Abascal), Belarus (Lukashenko), and most violently reflected by Russia’s Putin after the invasion of Ukraine, is evidence that the desire to turn back the clock against rapid social changes is not just an American trend.

The scholarship on the racist skinhead gangs at the end of the last century has provided a road map to understand the right-wing extremism in this century, but also the widening pool of Americans falling into Toole’s militia funnel. In 2000, the concern was the white teenage boy challenged by Black History Month, a new Gay-Straight Alliance at his school, and the lack of job prospects waiting for him after graduation. Now, that concern is of a much wider pool who are challenged by pronouns, a pandemic-induced slide into recession, and somehow thinking black lives mattering implies their lives don’t. The “law and order” voices who promise to reduce the anomie have moved from the political fringes to the mainstream. In many ways, those racist skinheads’ fantasies of a world run by authoritarian ideologues have never been closer.