What does it mean to be a man? There are many different ways to answer, but some forms of masculinity are more harmful than others. Over the past decade, toxic, violent, hyper-masculinity has skyrocketed within our culture, especially online.
Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, extremist scholar and Founder of PERIL at American University, joins Jen to simplify the problem ahead of us: there is danger in entangling masculinity with violence. More disturbingly, how it is manifesting in ICE recruitment. The rabbit holes that lead young men towards that ideology are growing in scope, reach, and prevalence. But, Dr. Miller-Idriss assures us that there are techniques that can bolster young people’s resilience against far-right propaganda of the manosphere.
To learn more about the research PERIL is working on, click here.
Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a sociologist and professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education, and is the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL). An MSNBC columnist and a regular commentator in U.S. and international media, Miller-Idriss is the author of Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton), The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany (Princeton), and Blood and Culture: Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. Bundled up in front of her fire is Cynthia Miller-Idriss, of course, from PERIL, here to talk to us about ways to interdict and prevent violent extremism. Welcome, Cynthia, good to see you again.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Thanks for having me, Jen. Good to be here.
Jen Rubin
We have an epidemic of violent extremism. We see it now in our own government, frankly, and we see it in rogue individual actors. But there are ways of combating it and disentangling particularly young men from this path of violent extremism, and it’s worked elsewhere. Tell us about PERIL’s research, and what can be done before you create the Gregory Bovinos, the murderous assailants that we see, acting as lone wolves.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. It’s a question that I hope lets some of us engage with the contemporary moment with some hope, with some efficacy, and also, like, a sense of empowerment. I think that it’s really important for people to feel like there are things that we can do in this moment. And one of the things we know about prevention of violence and prevention of mobilization of violence is that It does work best when it starts very early, which means, you know, quite upstream as we work in peril with parents, with grandparents, with teachers, caregivers, coaches, mental health counselors, faith leaders, all of whom, one, can prevent kids from becoming completely swept up in rabbit holes of disinformation, with young people in their lives.
You can be alert to that kind of stuff, to what types of things are they saying? Are they saying that, there is no political solution, for example, which is something that we have heard from young people on the left and the right. which is a call to violence as the solution, right? So, listening to what kids are saying, listening to what young people are saying, in particular is one step. Another is really understanding the ecosystems where people spend their time that mobilize them to violence by telling them it’s heroic. And so we have seen this with the massive disinformation. Coming from the fringes and now from the mainstream that tells us, you know, falsely claims One group is a domestic terrorist, falsely claims that peaceful protesters are domestic terrorists, which Can make people, in this case, in the government itself. feel empowered and justified and afraid, of someone who is peacefully protesting, because they’re… they believe their bosses, their leaders, who are telling them these are domestic terrorists.
And so, you know, being wary of disinformation that mobilizes veterans, for example, as we saw on January 6th, right, to say you’re defending the Constitution, or that mobilizes someone to feel like you’re saving your race, you’re rescuing your people. I mean, that can be a very persuasive narrative for people to feel like they’re the ones being heroic. And so those two things are the things I would start with, is listening and really being aware of how you can Prevent people from being persuaded by false, conspiratorial, and dangerous narratives that are fueled by disinformation.
Jen Rubin
You do see that this is very much bound up with images of masculinity. Obviously, whether it’s ICE, or Border Patrol, or a young assassin who is a lone wolf, they have a sense that in order to be men, in order to be powerful, they have to use violence, and they have to use it at people who are identified as the other. What have we learned from other nations’ experiences on ways to interrupt this system and this cycle of young men being almost fed into a pipeline of violence and extremism?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, well, I mean, first, there’s two sort of questions there, I think, to address. One is, like, this cultural moment of resurgent hyper-masculinity, and that associates being a man with being violent, or being ready to be violent at any time, of being tough, dominant, aggressive. And even pushing things like, you know, young boys now, feeling they need to chew this sort of stale gum product, or practice something called mewing to make their jawlines more rigid, or, you know, have, take testosterone, right? Like, constant working out in the gym to be bigger, to be more muscular. as a reflection, not just of your own health or what you’re looking for, but as a reflection of your manhood, of what it means to be a man. And so the messages that boys are getting right now, and young men, about what it is to be a successful man in a moment of, you know, affordability crises, where it’s These other tropes of being a provider can be very hard for boys and men to… you know, accept or enact, but also reject, right? Because it’s just such a hard time in terms of the economic system, and so this other narrative that… the protector narrative, right, becomes very compelling and strong in these moments, and we are seeing that. And so we’re seeing that with the Secretary of Defense saying we need male standards in the military, with Mark Zuckerberg saying what we need is more masculine energy in the workforce. Right?
The idea that Charlie Kirk’s memorial service was a reflection, as someone said, of muscular patriotism or muscular Christianity. I mean, these are all evoking a certain kind of idealized man that is associated with the readiness to be violent at any time, to protect, to defend, and then that kind of feeds into these other narratives about invasion, defense, anti-immigrant narratives in particular when it comes to ICE. And then the protest, protesters being depicted themselves as a threat, as domestic terrorists.
So, I think you have to see those two things as very much intertwined with the way that men are being recruited into these movements, into state movements, I mean, into state agencies like ICE, with advertisements that really tell them, you can come, like, video advertisements for ICE that have gone after law enforcement, telling them to come and you know, and here… here you get to, you know, get rid of the worst of the worst. You’re not constrained by these sanctuary city policies, right? So this real, like, you can come be a real man here, essentially. So I think we have to, one, look at that narrative really carefully and think about ways to challenge and interrupt it.
And there’s a lot of work going on in the men’s wellness world to really try to do that, to talk about how how to interrupt this pattern between violence and masculinity, or between manhood and violent mobilization, both on a domestic and intimate partner violence side, and in this case, on mass violence or state-enacted violence. What other countries are doing, one, is investing in that relationship, so there’s a new effort happening in Australia and Brazil in other countries around the world, I’m part of a group of people who are, you know, part of this global group that will be announced pretty soon, led by Equamundo and the Christchurch Call Foundation, and a global feminist organization, really trying to unpack this relationship between Manhood, masculinity, violence, but also education, democracy.
So I think, one, we see other countries investing, we see foundations investing, and we see policies coming into place that are trying to protect young people from social media harms. And we also see huge investments on the education side, on really understanding, again, this isn’t a situation where you can just keep building bigger fences. particularly when the violence right now is coming from the state, we can’t rely on the security sector to prevent violence. We have to invest in education, and so we have to see that media and digital literacy is a huge part of this.
Jen Rubin
It is, to some degree, about building a kind of emotional resiliency, a set of tripwires, so that when someone is bombarded with these messages or enticed with this, they have kind of the inner resources to say, wait, I’m being manipulated… I’m being manipulated, I’m being used by someone. How do you deliver that message, literally, figuratively, to so many people? Is it through schools? Is it through communities? Where do they get the intervention?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, there’s so many ways to do this. Like, one way that we do it in our research lab is through short-form video that goes out over social media in partnership with influencers who have large followings, where we test the scripting, and then they often deliver the message in their own words to their own followers. So, you know, we have one of my favorites is a Dungeons & Dragons influencer who kind of delivers the message in his own costume in his own way to his audience that’s taken up very well by his followers. You know, but we’ve tested the messaging, so we understand what works to help people be more skeptical of the media they consume and reject a propaganda message that’s Embedded in a kind of manipulative tactic.
So one manipulative tactic, for example, is transfer. We see that a lot, where propagandists try to get you to associate something positive with their message, and we just saw a bunch of these come out from Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, messages that get you to see, you know, pretty images of the West, of a man on a horse, and messages about home and homeland, you know. But actually, that’s a quote from a white supremacist song, right? We’ll have our home again, right? But it’s sort of associating a cozy word, a word that we like “home” or the idea that we are gonna have something together, right? These are concepts that actually, in iconography, that can make us feel empowered in some way, this exploratory nature.
But that Western iconography is also kind of saying we’re gonna reclaim something if we’re gonna have our home again, right? So it’s both things happening at the same time. So recognizing that tactic of transfer and seeing a microdose of the propaganda helps people, reject it. So, but you can also do this in classrooms, you can do it with parents, right?
We’ve seen a lot of research in public health that tries to teach teenagers, for example, about the manipulative tactics of fast food advertisements. as a way to get them to make healthier choices about the food they consume, so that it’s in the better long-term interest of their own health, cholesterol, diabetes, BMI, right? Rather than saying, you know, you should do this because your body will be healthier, they’re more likely to make healthy choices if they do it because they don’t want to be manipulated by fast food advertisements than they are if they just are told by an adult that it’s better for them.
So, you’re not telling people what to think, you’re teaching them how to think, and that’s a strategy that is really important, both in protecting free speech, but also in helping people build lifelong resilience, psychologically and emotionally, to bad actors and manipulation online.
Jen Rubin
I’m struck by how similar the tactics are, regardless of who the ‘other’ is. You’ve seen this development of awful, which is a slur directed at white affluent women. It’s the same kind of slur, in a different context that you would hear about murderous, undocumented immigrants is the same that you might hear in an anti-Semitic vein. It almost doesn’t matter what the target is, it’s the othering, the dis… and the dehumanization of the victim that is the similarity that seems to be the through line through all of this.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I mean, what we see constantly, and I think often of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory as the best example of this, which is, it’s… the reason why it’s so powerful as a conspiracy theory… this is a conspiracy theory that says that Jews are conspiring with feminists, essentially, to, to eradicate white civilization and replace it with a multicultural one, right?
But there’s versions of it that come up with Democrats are replacing voters with immigrants, right, to seize more power. And the targets of the violent fringes who are mobilized by the great conspiracy theory have been kids at a summer camp in Oslo who were progressive… for a progressive politician, you know, political group that was, you know, he wanted to eradicate the future leadership that would support multicultural societies. He was mobilized by that conspiracy theory. A mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, near two mosques, the El Paso Walmart shooting, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the buffalo shooting in a supermarket, right? Those are Black Americans, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, and kids—Norwegian kids at a summer camp. All targets motivated by the same conspiracy theory, even though the targets are different.
And that because that conspiracy theory is anyone who’s not white, or anyone who’s not promoting a white majority society is a threat, and it’s an existential threat. So what we see is that us versus them thinking, the existential threat, the dehumanization, and then ultimately the belief that you’re a martyr acting heroically to thwart this threat. And that is, you know, we saw it from the fringes for so many years under the first Trump administration and later. And, and now we’re seeing it again, but coming from the state, some of the same kind of rhetoric and language.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. One of the things that we hear again and again is that young men, and to some degree young people in general, become very isolated, in an online world, in which this dehumanization is more likely to occur. It’s harder to hate people who you are engaged in social connections, in neighborly activities. How important is the simple act of socialization of community, of reaching out to people so that they don’t go down these rabbit holes of conspiracy?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, there’s sort of two… at least two or three components of this that I think are really relevant and important to understand. One is a loneliness crisis, which is the data showing is across the board. Boys are lonely, girls are lonely, men and women are lonely. Lonelier than previous generations. We’re less connected to others socially, we spend too much time online, and we’re lonelier. The problem there is not that, men are more lonely than women, because the data is pretty muddy on that, in some studies it shows it’s the same, but men’s loneliness is weaponized by social media platform engagement and influencers in particular who say it’s women’s fault, they’re rejecting you, their standards are too high, they’re manipulative, they’re transactional, they’re not gonna date you, right?
Whatever it is, like, it’s feminists who are, you know, working too much, not promoting a traditional society, they’re stacked against you. So it’s the scapegoating and the fear-mongering that comes in, which doesn’t happen in the case of women’s loneliness. It’s really only targeting men and boys who are lonely with the scapegoating. The second is the part that you just talked about, which is the social isolation itself.
And that does, you know, sort of two things. One, people tend to move to extremes when they are… this is Cass Sunstein’s book called Going to Extremes, argues this and shows this. that people move to extremes when they are not confronted regularly with enough ideas that are counter to their own, right? It’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to have liberal arts discussion in colleges that have a broad range of opinions, because if you’re just surrounded by people who groupthink, right, people who think like you, you move further and further in that direction, whether that’s to the left or to the right. And so, you tend to migrate to the fringes if you’re not engaged with conversations that challenge you, and the way that online spaces work with the kind of echo chambers of information and media that comes at you, you’re less likely to have that kind of conversation. And so the social isolation also changes how we think and believe. It’s not just that it’s weaponized, it also sort of filters our reasoning into a way that makes us gravitate to the fringes.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. What do parents, educators, sports coaches, other institutions that deal with young people, what do they do, and how can they access, the kind of teaching skills, the kind of intervention skills you’re talking about?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, this is a great question, and one of the things that’s been striking to me, I was on book tour in the fall, I had 25 stops, and one of the things I realized somewhere around, like, stop 15 was that the first question in every audience didn’t matter who I was talking to. The first question was always from someone asking something personal. About, usually as a parent. But often, if it was a younger person in a college, it was about a brother or an uncle, sometimes a parent, right? And so, I think the first thing is to realize, like, you’re… everybody knows somebody who’s at risk. This is not just the fringes anymore, right?
Everyone who knows somebody who’s at risk of being so isolated in their lives, so online, that they start developing, you know, anti-democratic beliefs, or anti-feminist beliefs, or racist ideas, or something that is harmful to cohesive you know, community and society, right? There’s risk of being exploited by bad actors, scammed by, you know, by someone on the IRS. Like, whatever the risk is, we’re all at risk, essentially, and so we all have to participate in the resilience building. And I think when you think about it that way, one of the things I’ve learned is that when we talk to parents, for example. in PTAs or in schools, they… they don’t often show up in the same numbers when we talk about the risks of online radicalization as they do when we talk about how do we safeguard kids from harmful online settings, right? So safeguarding kids is the same thing as preventing online radicalization, but it’s different.
So, I think the first thing to understand is, like, a lot of people think that couldn’t possibly happen to me. That couldn’t possibly be my kid, or my uncle, or whatever, and I think getting out of that mindset, first of all, is really helpful, just to think, like, we’re all at risk. I’m at risk. I don’t know what to do. My kids could be at risk. Anybody could be exposed at any time to harmful, violent content that they didn’t expect to see that can cause all kinds of knock-on effects that can desensitize, dehumanize, but also cause problematic mental effects, right, essentially for kids and for adults. So staying informed and learning how to talk to kids about what they see online, talk to your family members, and so whether you’re in the FBI, whether I’m talking to them as counterterrorism officials, or I’m talking to them as teachers, often it’s the personal thing that draws them to the first set of questions.
In terms of what to do, we do have a lot of resources on our websites, which, you know, we can put up again in the show notes or in the link there, which is perilresearch.com. free guides for parents, for teachers, for mental health counselors and faith leaders on how to have these conversations. We have little conversation starter packs for faith leaders, for example, developed with the evangelical community to help them start talking about these things in Sunday school settings, right, about social media harms. You can use those anywhere, but that’s something that was created at the request of some evangelical pastors who asked for help what they were seeing, and so we co-created this with a grant to do it. So I think it’s, you know, understanding that, nobody knows how to do it, and everybody needs to learn how to do it, and to continually learn how to do it, and sometimes it’s… having uncomfortable conversations that are also just marked by curiosity and not by judgment, but sort of where did you hear that, and what do you think it means, and… and how do you… how do you understand that, and how… how might that be shaping your way of… Of interacting in the world are questions that can help drive people toward healthier and more productive engagements.
Jen Rubin
And perhaps one of the, bright lights is that when we see entire communities come together, when we see, labor leaders, business leaders, faith leaders, academics, just ordinary people come together, I think that resonates to some degree with people, that there is joy, there’s sustenance, there’s comfort. in a community. And, I think the bottom line is more community is a better thing for all of us. We’re all social beings, and we don’t do well when we’re isolated and pitted against one another.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
No, we need each other. We need each other in a storm, we need each other in, you know, in a moment of anti-democratic, mobilization, right? And I think watching Minnesotans and seeing the videos of Boston protests chanting, that was so moving yesterday, chanting something like. you know, we’re not afraid, because Minnesotans, you know, taught us to be brave, right?
Like, you know, how much the world is watching, and how much… you know, what we know from histories of nonviolent protests around the world, and what does it look like to see, so much mobilization, including from conservative, Republican, from the National Rifle Association… you know, that unlikely allies, right, saying, this is wrong, we need an investigation, this is not okay, you cannot label someone a domestic terrorist just because they showed up armed. You know, whatever your own views about firearms are, the fact that there’s so many people coming together from across that community, the Second Amendment community, and saying, this is wrong, I think is pretty remarkable. So it’s… It’s community and it’s solidarity, I guess is what I’m saying, right? Those things are really important.
Jen Rubin
And there is a reason why authoritarian regimes want us isolated, want us depressed, do not want us to reach out, and that is their secret sauce. But we’ve also seen that, frankly, it sounds corny, but love, solidarity, community is really the, the kryptonite for authoritarian regimes.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Feeling less isolated, promoting solidarity, promoting community, and feeling less helpless, I think, is also just knowing there’s things that we can each of us do is a powerful in the face of injustice.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Cynthia. It is always a hopeful experience talking to you, and there are solutions, and what’s more, there’s science behind it, and there’s research. So thank you for all you do, thank you for PERIL. Keep warm, keep safe.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
I’m gonna go back out and shovel, but good to see you, and stay warm and safe in the ice and snow.
Jen Rubin
Take care. Bye-bye.
