Over the past few weeks, there have been multiple shootings in the public spotlight. There are similarities among three of them: the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, the shooting in a Colorado high school, and the shooting at an ICE facility in Texas. All alleged shooters had been what experts call “terminally online.” And while pundits and others analyze or politicize the shooters’ messages, experts say those politicians and media outlets are getting it all wrong.
Pasha Dashgart is the director of research for the PERIL lab at American University in Washington, D.C., which studies online extremism. He talked with WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
It feels like there's no one that's more in the spotlight of this polarization right now than Tyler Robinson, the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk. And a lot of focus has been on this potential transgender roommate/lover, but less conversation almost on Robinson himself, who seems quite isolated, spends a lot of time online. Was there anything that you took from his story in particular that signaled something new, or just reinforced what you already know?
I think that the way the media has covered it as like, “Is he far right, is he far left? Is he trans?” I think that concept is really kind of old, frankly, for people who are in the extremism research space. We’ve kind of moved past that.
There is a sense in which being terminally online is itself radicalizing, and it desensitizes you and it normalizes violence and gore and this really extreme kind of content that, frankly, I don’t think parents or teachers really understand how bad this content is and how easily accessible it is. And so my perspective was when I saw all these, like real in-the-weeds, obscure memes written on the bullet casings and stuff, it’s like, I don’t know what that kid’s politics are. I actually don’t think it matters. That’s somebody who was seized by extremist content on the internet.
At a certain point, ideological, left, right, liberal, conservative, that stuff kind of all breaks down. And it’s just really more about being extreme, speaking to your community.
There was a news story about the text messages between him and a friend about this shooting where he’s like, “Oh my God, if the Fox News anchor reads about bulges, I’m going to die.” That’s actually a really important data point for us as researchers to understand this is a performative type of violence.
The amount of worship of mass shooters as martyrs or as role models in a perverse sort of sense, that’s a very real thing. There’s a sense in which the political leanings, like our politics, are kind of upended. But in this context, with these kinds of people, it doesn’t matter who this guy voted for. We’re so far past that. This violence was done for his community of terminally online people who are going to laugh and understand the references he’s making.
It feels like there's just this very stark binary that people are trying to make sense of motivations, instead of understanding the root cause. From a parent's point of view, what are the warning signs that they may be seeing in their young kids that they are leaning into these online spaces?
So some of those red flags are changes in behavior, isolation, changes in clothing, changes of language. If they start referencing a bunch of memes, they start talking about Chads and Stacys and alphas and sigmas… Well, some of that stuff is so mainstream now that it doesn't actually indicate radicalization. But there are terms, phrases and ideas that still reference really obscure far-right or other platforms.
But it's also an interest in buying weapons. It's an interest in more violence or in condoning violence as a solution to problems. It's this black-and-white thinking that it's us versus them. It's my group is incompatible with the existence of this outside group. And some of this is just mental health stuff.
Where it's like isolation, alienation, ostracization, hopelessness. So many of these supremacist ideologies are rooted in this idea of hopelessness — that there's nothing you can do. You were born short, you were born with the wrong-shaped jaw, and so now you just die alone. Think about how painful that is for somebody who's struggling with insecurity or feeling sort of unfulfilled — that it's like it's never going to get better.
There's nothing you can do to change it. The world is against you. And then you can see how the next step in that statement is, so what are you going to do? Who should you punish in order to make up for this? And that's how you get from a 15-year-old kid who's insecure to a mass shooter.
You've painted a very clear picture on how radicalization happens or how hopelessness happens in these spaces. Are these spaces also providing the targets or the villains to be on the other end of these mass shootings?
One hundred percent, this is the other half of it, right? It's like they have a list of enemies. This is my in-group, so then who's the out-group? The out-group depends on which toxic online space we're talking about. But typically it's women, feminists, Jews, Black people, Muslims, immigrants, refugees. And then you build out from there trying to undermine our way of life. They're trying to take what is what has been ours.
As I'm listening to this, and I had brought this up that we were with some colleagues and they had mentioned the rise of this kind of language and messaging and coded conversation in women's spaces or traditional women's spaces. Someone had told me that they had seen this in online gardening spaces and knitting spaces. I'm also wondering if you're seeing this on your end in spaces that women traditionally meet online or have been meeting online.
Definitely. Male supremacy appeals to women on some level as well. And within the white supremacist utopia, white women in particular have a role to play in perpetuating the white race and trying to have more white babies. And so in that sense, it is important to the movement that they get buy-in from women.
I will say in terms of the “Trad-Wife” stuff, a lot of that content is actually from men. It's not really for women. It's actually wish fulfillment for dudes.
One reason I reached out to you is because there are young people in my life, and I wish they would all make great choices online, which I know that they do not. And the first time I came across your work was the Parent and Caretaker Guide. Can you break down all of the work that you put into this guide and how it could help parents trying to learn how to navigate these spaces with their own young people in their lives.
The parent and caregiver guide emerged out of COVID. We were working at PERIL with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and we realized this was a real confluence of a couple of different factors that were going to make things really bad in terms of online radicalization.
So you had a bunch of young kids who were online more than ever because they were going to school remotely. And then when they were done, there was nowhere for them to go. Parents were monitoring their kids’ behavior less than ever because, if you recall, parents also were working remotely. So mom and dad are working and the children are on the computer completely unmonitored. Nobody knows what’s happening with them over there.
And then you had all these conspiracy theories. All this misinformation was running rampant online. So we wrote a guide that was like, what do parents need to know? What are the red flags and warning signs? What are strategies for talking to your kids? What is a rabbit hole? What is a filter bubble? What is an algorithm like? Really giving people very basic digital literacy, media literacy, background in extremism, like how do extremist groups operate? How do they radicalize people? So it was sort of an information component, but then also a behavior component. What can I do? How do I have these conversations effectively?
And then this is something that PERIL really sets us apart from a lot of other research labs. We test our guides rigorously before we put them out in the world. So we did a huge study of the parent and caregiver guide, so we could immediately see how much we shift people’s knowledge and intention to act. We got a bunch of really cool data, my favorite of which is 12% of people who read our guide either joined or created a group about youth radicalization. After reading the guide, 11% of people used the information found in the guide to interrupt the radicalized brain of a young person in their life.
So this is real stuff happening, right? It’s not just cool, it’s not just theoretical. People really did use this information to help young people in their own life.
What are some of the strategies to interrupt or to be present or to even engage with, let's say, teens who maybe some of the most difficult demographics to like, have a conversation with?
The first thing I'll say is this is hard, right? There's no magic bullet. There's no secret set of words that are going to work to unlock your teen. The second thing I would say is this isn't the only conversation you're going to have about this, so don't approach this like I got to get everything out there. I'm going to talk to a kid who's going down the Andrew Tate rabbit hole, and I'm going to turn them into a feminist by the end of the conversation… that's not what's going to happen.
You're trying to open up dialog rather than shut it down. And so come from a place, as hard as this can be, come from a place of curiosity. Come from a non-judgmental place. You need to ask the kid, ultimately, what is appealing to you about this? What does this person say or do that sort of resonates with you? What's the hurt behind the reason that you're doing this?
I said before, I'm a social psychologist. I didn't come to this work from the perspective of terrorism studies or violence prevention. I came to this as a psychologist. And one of the things that's very obvious about this work is that we overindex on ideology. It's actually not that important. You ask some incel about the tenants of inceldom and they don't know. You ask some white supremacist if they have ever read the Turner Diaries? Have you read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? No. They're there because of emotional reasons.
They're there because of relationships. When you think about what attracts people to these kinds of movements, often it is that they meet psychological needs that aren't being met in other ways.
