Healing from hate How young men get into--and out of--violent extremism

There is a vintage piece of neo-Nazi propaganda that is a racist take on an old Charles Atlas ad. After the whiny young protagonist bulks up and punches out a black man who bullied him, beachgoers in bikinis coo and pat his biceps. The cartoon makes Kimmel's point perfectly: Extremism is fueled by wounded masculinity. In Kimmel's astute and, yes, empathetic analysis, he argues that without understanding the gendered aspect of extremism (he looks mostly at white supremacist groups, but also jihadists), we will not be able to defuse it. The young men in this book are enticed not by ideology, but by the powerful draw of camaraderie, belonging and a moral code, not to mention access to women and sex (even if, in the case of jihadis, it's in the afterlife). Having suffered trauma, abuse, the need to keep homosexuality closeted, loneliness, economic insult or more mundane indignities, they turn to violence to ward off shame, coming to the table with what Kimmel, a sociologist who has spent his career focused on masculinity, calls "aggrieved entitlement." The racist framework that comes to explain their woes usually arrives later. Kimmel looks at recovering extremists in four countries - Germany, Sweden, the United States and Britain - and the organizations that help them escape when they become disillusioned. Those groups - EXIT in Germany and Sweden, Life After Hate in America and Quilliam, which works with British jihadis - offer not just safety, as many "formers" face violence when they try to leave, but also counseling, job training and the rudiments of an alternative form of manhood. (Life After Hate was given a $400,000 grant by the Obama administration, but it was later rescinded by Trump.) Kimmel makes it clear that any approach to recovery lacking in empathy will fail. These men, he argues, have in fact lost something - they have been passed by and overlooked. But, Kimmel writes, they have been delivering their hate mail to the wrong address.