RadicalizationFrom Hateful Words to Real Violence

The Gilroy Garlic Festival. The Poway Chabad synagogue. The Charleston Emanuel church. The El Paso Walmart. One common denominator in these mass shootings and countless others? A perpetrator whose interactions in online white supremacist networks played a part in inciting, energizing, and detonating racial hatred into real violence, says UNLV sociologist Simon Gottschalk.

Gottschalk and graduate students Celene Fuller, Jaimee Nix, and Daniel Okamura recently analyzed more than 4,400 discussion threads from eight blogs hosted on three prominent white supremacist websites. Comments were posted during and immediately after 2017 rallies in Charlottesville and on the University of Florida campus, as well as on “a relatively uneventful day” in terms of media attention to the white supremacist movement and activities in August 2017.

Researchers developed a model that explains how individuals who join white supremacist networks transform private feelings of fear, anger, and shame into a sense of power, pride, belonging, and a desire for vengeance. Eventually, some of these individuals convert those emotions into violence. 

Ahead of the study’s release in an upcoming issue of Deviant Behavior, UNLV News sat down with Gottschalk to learn why he believes it’s crucial to understand how interactions in these online networks recruit, transform, and radicalize members; how they can prompt some to engage in violent acts; and what can be done about it. 

The Typical Profile
Gottschalk says it’s difficult to trace the profile of people who post on these sites because, except for a username and an icon, they are purposefully anonymous and invisible — which explains the attraction of those networks. He aims to develop a social-psychological profile instead.

Individuals who are denied the social recognition they expect  — for example, love, esteem, respect, solidarity — can experience feelings of anger, fear and shame. Individuals in these situations typically repress those painful emotions, which only intensifies them, and are also motivated to blame others. This switch in the target of negative feelings can lead to feelings of anger, ranging from fury to the desire for revenge against the imagined victimizer.

“One of the key functions of white supremacist networks is to tap into and manipulate those repressed emotions,” Gottschalk says. “They do so by convincing recruits that the social psychological pain they experience at the personal level is actually caused by anti-white discrimination.”