How Does Someone Become a Neo-Nazi? | American Recovery

How does one become a neo-Nazi? It's, as I mentioned, I've been doing this work 16 years, and I've done it internationally. I travel around the world from Abu Dhabi to Norway to Tijuana and everywhere in between, Sydney, Australia. And in traveling like that, I meet a lot of other formers. Like in the counter-violent extremism space, I'm what's known as a former, as in a former violent extremist. And pretty much all of the formers I know had a lot of what they call in the mental health field adverse childhood experiences. Like, I have a friend, Chris Buckley, who I helped to get out of the Ku Klux Klan, and his entire childhood was just a waking nightmare the entire time. Like, sexual abuse, physical abuse, poverty, addiction. In my case, I'm a bit of an outlier. in that my childhood was relatively idyllic, certainly compared to Chris's and compared to a lot of my other peers in this space. Everybody has an origin story about what got them to a place where these narratives seemed appealing. For me, I'm Arno Michaelis IV, and I come from a long line of alcoholics. All the Arnos before me were alcoholics. and uh on my mom's side my mom's not an alcoholic but there's a lot of alcoholism and addiction in her side of the family so i was genetically predisposed and as i'm sure you've heard this term all the time and in any recovery space an adrenaline junkie like real life was never interesting enough for me i always had to like disrupt things around me to make it interesting and i started out as a bully on the school bus as a little kid and i got a kick out of seeing other kids afraid of me i got a kick out of seeing parents afraid of me and even teachers and the principal afraid of me and that kick became my high like that was the rush that i was pursuing all the time and like any kind of thrill what i do talks a lot of talks in k-12 in middle school and i'm talking to kids i'm like who likes roller coasters yeah i like roller coasters i'm like you know that first time you go on a roller coaster and you're going up that first big hill and you're like and all this tension is building and you don't know when it's gonna drop and then it finally drops and you're like woo and you might go upside down and you're going all over the place and it's it's a rush but if you go on that same roller coaster 10 times in a row aside from probably losing your lunch like the 10th time it's not a thrill anymore yeah you're like okay oh here we go all right it's not the rush it was the first time and my anti-social behavior as a kid followed that same path so it got boring to beat this kid up on the school bus by myself so i like egged on the whole bus to beat this kid up as it's the way of like escalating the the chaos escalating the disruption and that proceeded from bully on the school bus to fights in the schoolyard to breaking and entering to vandalism i started drinking when i was 14 it was absolutely gasoline on a fire by the time i was 16 i was a full-blown alcoholic i had been violent since i was a little kid so i was very just accustomed and conditioned to violence and hate i found the more i i said and felt hate like that was just kind of the cherry on top of all this this rush that i'm pursuing all the time i i think every human being who's ever been a teenager had at least a moment in their teenage life when they're going through puberty and the hormones are raging and a parent or a teacher says you can't do this thing that you really want to do and the kid's like oh i hate you like i think everybody's felt that at least once for a glimpse but for me i'm like oh i hate you and i hate this town and i hate this school and i hate the cops and i hate society and i found like the more i vocalized that hate the more of a rush i got and that's who i was when i was exposed to white nationalism through white power skinhead music so then what specifically around that time you said about 16 17 what specifically was it that that that what gave you that allure into the into the neo-nazi skinhead white nationalists group i my entire life i've been really into storytelling as i as i mentioned and when i was a little kid i would go to a library and i would just come out with a huge pile of books on like greek myths and norse myths and i'd read about hercules and thor and odin and all these quests and they're fighting monsters like i was a super into that i i read a lot of fantasy i was super into fantasy books i played dungeons and dragons from the time i was in sixth grade and and here is this music that's telling me i am a white warrior who has to save his race from extinction at the hands of this evil jewish plot to kill all the white people on the planet earth and as ridiculous as that should sound to any thinking person to 16 year old arno this was like it was the best thing i'd ever come across well was it was it like was it was it exacerbating or was it an escape for something that you were feeling inside was it was it it wasn't a release identifying into this music or what's but what exactly was that it was really like just the the highest level of pissing people off that i had come across to that point like prior to becoming a skinhead i was a punk rocker and i i screamed in punk rock bands and i was i don't have a lick of musical talent but i used to be able to scream really loud get crazy on stage i had a lot of fun doing it i was good at that and punk rock to me was just about like breaking things and pissing people off that was what my punk was about well nothing pisses people off like a swastika like that that was the big attraction to me even though i knew why people were repulsed by the swastika i grew up with a lot of jewish friends i one of my first friends growing up was a kid named dean caplan and my dad and his dad would sit around drinking scotch while me and dean would play legos and just hang out and but we had that quintessential conversation that every like jewish and non-jewish kid have when i'm like you mean to tell me you get presents for eight days whoa that's not fair Dean's like, yeah, but the eight days, like, don't really even add up to your one day of Christmas. Like, don't feel bad about it. But Dean was awesome, and I had all kinds of other Jewish friends. In sixth grade, I went to all kinds of bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. And I had nothing but good experiences with Jewish people. I grew up in, like, a pretty well-to-do suburb, and my family was kind of living beyond their means to be there. The suburb was predominantly Euro-American people. but um the few afro-american kids that were that lived where i did and the few like asian and latino kids i was friends with all them and i had nothing but good experiences with them in fact i was actually a break dancer in the early 80s like before it got really popular for white kids to be listening to hip-hop and then as soon as it got popular i'm like okay i'm done with that i don't want to do what everybody else is doing that all happened before this 16 year old encounter with the swastika and with the music and with the narrative. And because it just tripped my addiction so hard and it gave me that rush that I was constantly seeking, like addiction always does, it disconnected me from all my childhood friends and from all the good things in my life. And the further I fell into it, the more miserable things got. Folks, if you enjoyed this short video, check out the link right there for the full episode.