Deradicalization Strategies for Blue Anon and other Extremists
Do you have a loved one who has been radicalized by the DNC and its communications arms like the mainstream media, think tanks, NGOs, and academia?
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We Americans are weathering a harrowing storm of radicalization. While we often hear about the well-known dangers of fringe white and Islamic extremism, we rarely hear about radicalization that is legitimizing, for example, nationwide violent riots, or causing ordinary political disputes between Democrats and Republicans to escalate into Democrats violently attacking Republicans.
In the early morning of September 18, 2022, shortly after a party in McHenry, North Dakota, Shannon Brandt, 41, fatally drove his SUV into Cayler Ellingson, 18. Brandt fled the scene but later called 911.
An affidavit pertaining to the event stated that Brandt told police Ellingson was “part of a Republican extremist group” and that the two had argued over political issues before the fatal hit-and-run.[i]
This tragic outcome is what our civil religion and political system were designed to avoid. And yet the frequency of such incidents is on the rise, from the mass shooting by a left-wing street activist in Ohio[ii] to the politically motivated mass shooting by a Democratic party volunteer at a Republican baseball event[iii]. More recently, a woman was indicted for threatening to assassinate Aileen Cannon, the judge responsible for ordering the special master in the Trump classified documents case.[iv]
Prior to the threat, countless prominent twitter accounts, reddit threads, and news reports had insinuated without evidence that Cannon enjoyed an unethical relationship with Trump. These communications support the conclusion that more sober, centrist authorities were involved in the radicalization of the perpetrator.
Indeed, such radicalization is affecting even non-partisan civil rights organizations like the ADL and moderate economic think tanks like the Cato Institute.
In a previous post, we saw how the ADL had been radicalizing Americans into adopting extremist and hateful misconceptions about the abstract, omnipotent evil demiurge known in the establishment as “white people”.[v] In reality, this ill-defined abstraction is used to discriminate against declasse, downscale, and working class descendants of white ethnic immigrants, many of whom descend directly from lineages that spent a thousand years or more in servitude to the aristocratic and business elites of Europe.
Similarly, during a recent Cato Institute event, Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that the concerns about domestic manufacturing (a bipartisan concern) were borne of “the fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in”.
This statement evidences the paranoid, conspiratorial style that increasingly dominates establishment American communications to the public, and which seems to be encouraging the kinds of primitive, polarizing convictions about group abstractions that led to the horrors of WW2.
In the context of the ADL and Peterson Institute, this paranoid approach is often justified by the goal of deradicalizing or disempowering white supremacists, a group of people constituting a tiny fraction of the American population. While such a goal is a noble one under our civil religion, such nobility does not excuse the ADL or Posen’s dereliction of the duty to promote sober, moderate material consistent with the American civil religion.
The ADL and Posen’s adoption of radically racist superstitions about “white people” demonstrates just how easy it is for even respectable, politically neutral American individuals and institutions to be seduced by extremism. Does Posen’s statement accord with the mission statement of the institution he heads?
“The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to strengthening prosperity and human welfare in the global economy through expert analysis and practical policy solutions.[vi]”
Fortunately, there is a growing body of research and corresponding deradicalization consulting market, populated in part by Federal law enforcement and in part by NGOs like the Touchbase, which are generating strategies to cope with such radicalization.
For example, Parents for Peace have found success in deradicalizing extremists ranging from autistic child ISIS supporters to QAnon uncles, largely by leveraging psychological research on extremism.[vii]
On the government side, the FBI launched a deradicalization program that included an interactive game to help radicalized youth understand how they were being manipulated or “psyopped” into harboring extreme beliefs.[viii] However, we at the Touchbase are cautious about such programs, both because of the FBI’s checkered history with deradicalization (they tend to radicalize)[ix], and because we believe inflaming individual narcissism and stoking paranoia about being controlled is counterproductive to the resocialization goals of deradicalization.
Here at the Touchbase, we encourage the Parents for Peace approach.
One of the ways to understand the kinds of radicalization described above is in terms of gaslighting by the mass media. Many Americans have been gaslit by the media and DNC into believing that the urgent bipartisan issues raised by the Trump election, such as common-sense immigration control, trade protections, and foreign policy restraint, are illegitimate byproducts of a grandiose conspiracy by abstract-omnipotent persecutors like Russia or White People. Gaslighting is a real political phenomenon documented by hard science and experts in structural racism.[x]
Indeed, psychotherapeutic concepts like gaslighting, addiction, and narcissism can help us compassionately approach the extreme and irrational convictions of extremists ranging from Blue Anon cult members to more refined public authorities like the Peterson Institute.
In particular, this substack has been exploring narcissism as a metaphor for group behavior. Here’s why it is essential to future deradicalization efforts:
It will help us understand why people cling to unrealistic grandiose images of their identity group in the face of harsh truths and progress, and why they perceive even slight disagreement or invitations to compromise as existential attacks on their group identity.
It will help us understand why groups turn to grandiose conspiracy theories like institutional racism, white supremacy, or Russiagate, to numb the deeper pain they experience during confrontations with arguments and information that undermine their group convictions.
It will help us understand why otherwise respectable political and academic leaders feel compelled to excuse irrational criminality and rioting.
Relatedly, it will help us understand why people increasingly misconstrue their subjective interpretations of events as legitimate, objective justifications for extreme conduct
It will help us understand why people feel entitled to demand representations of their subjective group self-images in entertainment media, and why they become enraged and paranoid when this goal is frustrated.
It will help us understand why real or imagined victimization by group-level persecution can never be a stable basis for a healthy social identity.
In future articles, we at the Touchbase will be considering various treatment methods for group narcissism. However, in the interim, here are some strategies for deradicalizing:
Never argue with a group narcissist. Instead, ask them open-ended questions that probe the uncertain boundaries of their abstract, grandiose group self-image. Encourage them to refine their group self-image (refinement is, after all, the essence of civilization).
Treat them with respect and afford them the civility demanded by our civil religion. For more information on how to do this, see my Primer.[xi]
Understand that their group self-image may be starved for validation given the harshness of the modern world and try to help them understand how you came to terms with the fallibility of your own group or personal identity.
Involve them in convivial social events and then passively encourage them to project their aggressive, conspiratorial inner world onto you. This can help them observe how their dedication to their group self-image causes them to behave antisocially around friends. The Posen faux pas described above is especially instructive here.
Encourage them to see the authorities and experts to whom they defer in life as fallible humans just like any other.
These strategies can help avoid triggering the potentially violent or illegal defense mechanisms employed by the narcissist to defend his omnipotent self-image. For more information on these defense mechanisms, see my Portrait.[xii]
Here are some examples from our deradicalization experts operating in the field:
But we won’t just be discussing social strategies. We’ll also look at institutional strategies for mitigating the harmful effects of extremism. For example, a future article will analyze how the absolute monarchs of high-modern Europe mitigated the creedal narcissism of a religiously fractured Europe, and thereby achieved nearly three hundred years of peace for European civilians.
I hope you’ve found this pitch persuasive. If you’re still skeptical about subscribing, consider the following testimonial from a respected substack community leader:
[i] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11251981/Democratic-driver-fatally-plowed-Republican-teen-NOT-house-arrest-curfew.html
[ii] https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/05/us/connor-betts-dayton-shooting-profile/index.html
[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shooting
[iv] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/12/trump-mar-a-lago-special-master-woman-charged-with-threatening-judge.html
https://www.piie.com/
[vii] https://archive.ph/29xfG
[viii] https://www.techtimes.com/articles/132317/20160210/fbi-has-a-new-dont-be-a-puppet-game-like-website-to-teach-kids-about-violent-extremism.htm
[ix] See, e.g., https://www.revolver.news/2020/10/wray-fbi-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-doj-bill-barr/, or https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolasmedinamora/did-the-fbi-transform-this-teenager-into-a-terrorist