Producer Eric Bombicino: "What is nihilistic, violent extremism and what can we do to combat it? Producer Eric Bombicino gets insight from Amarnath Amarasingam, an associate professor at Queen's University, in part two of their conversation on extremism.

Okay, so I did want to talk about, I guess it's a new form of extremism. And I think everything we just talked about in terms of understanding extremism might just get punted off the table here. Nihilistic, violent extremism. What is that and why is it, I guess, so confounding for you?"

Amarnath Amarasingam: "I mean, the problem is in the nihilism word, right? Where nihilism, at least philosophically, is a sense of meaninglessness, rootlessness, purposelessness, and a lot of extremist groups are the complete opposite of that, right? They, they want a white ethnostate or they want a caliphate or whatever it is. They're, they're building something. They're building a utopian vision. Whereas a lot of these guys and they come out of, you know, the core communities online, they come out of the true crime community online."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "So what are those?"

Amarnath Amarasingam: "So it's like there are online boards. Yeah. Where people are getting a lot of their excitement from, I don't even want to say community, but a lot, a lot of what, what they're consuming is gore content. So people getting hit by cars and dogs getting killed and that sort of content, and they're sitting there consuming this content. And the true crime community is the same as like, you know, the serial killer worship and that sort of thing, right? They come out of school shooter worship also like people that kind of attachment people have to the Columbine shooters from way back. So out of these communities is this new phenomenon called nihilistic violent extremism, where they are bullying young children into kind of harming themselves on camera. All of that stuff is happening. And so people don't know how to kind of explain it because it sounds like violent extremism, but there is no purpose to it. Right. And so that's where the trouble is, where that's where people are kind of struggling with is, is this just violence for violence sake? The UK government calls it violence fixation. In Canada, we call it non nihilistic violent extremism. So it's just this kind of weird obsession and attachment and fixation to violence. But it's not like the race war in the far right. We're out of that violence and chaos. Something beautiful and glorious arises for them. It's the violence is the purpose."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "Is this like the Joker-ization of extremism? Like I'm trying, I'm like, yeah, some people just want to see the world burn."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "So some people want to see the world burn is something that extremism researchers and policymakers and law enforcement don't know what to do with. Okay. Right. Because on the one hand, we're used to finding a manifesto or a flag or a book or something, you know, you read Mein Kampf, something to like point us towards ideology and belief systems, whereas we just want to destroy everything. Doesn't make any sense. Yeah, but they're unimaginably violent, especially towards young people, very young people. We've seen cases as young as nine and ten and 11. And so where to place that is difficult in a lot of our prevention programs now across the country are seeing an up tick in these cases as part of their caseload. And yeah, some of it is just they just need social workers and counsellors and therapy and talk things through. But there is no there's no ideological anything there."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "Could it lead eventually to some sort of belief system, something you'd call an ideology? We're in like a transition phase."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "It could be a transition phase. A few people have kind of argued that what they do, what they do is they'll you might find an ISIS video on their hard drive. You might find a neo-Nazi video on their hard drive. And people are like, how come, how can two competing ideologies be a part of the same person's computer? The reason for that is because the only thing they care about in those two videos is the violence, right? They like the violence part of it. They don't really care about the ideological part of it. So it could be a transition to something else, but we don't know what that's going to look like. But in the meantime, it's the trail of destruction that they're leaving behind."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "So folks are angry at the world. Yeah. They need to get back at it. They need to do something, but nothing means anything. There's no hope. Then I guess all you have is revenge. Does seem like revenge can be its own thing to motivate."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "Yeah. I don't even know if this is revenge. Like, for them. For them, it's just. They're just doing it for the lulls. They're just doing it for the kicks, right? They're just doing it because they can. And the online landscape kind of allows for some of this behaviour too. And they're just doing it for, for clout, right? They're just doing it because they're part of this weird, nefarious group and everyone's like digging each other up and seeing who can one up each other, right? It's like a it's like they're all playing Call of Duty except with real people. Yeah. Right. And, and young people tying it back to your liberalism question, like, is this the kind of end point meaninglessness also, right? Is this is this kind of the, the, the failure of modernity to provide these young people with something meaningful and purposeful that they're now reacting very bizarrely to this sense of norm, like rootlessness. Yeah, maybe. Right. And so that might be the end of it. The end result of all of this also is like, we have nothing to live for. This is all crazy anyway. This is all chaos and nothing meaning, you know, there's no heaven and there's no hell and it's all we're just all this and that, right? We're just all floating through space. And so why not cause as utmost, utmost destruction as humanly possible."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "So I don't know if this is related to nihilistic, violent extremism, but you did mention this idea of being a main character, and I wanted to sort of pick up on that. Are there more and more angry young men now that want to be they feel sidelined in their lives. They want to be the main character on a hero's journey. And hero's journey is a thing, and it ends in catharsis and salvation."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "Yeah, I don't know if that is part of nihilistic extremism, but I would say a lot of the other ideological groups, far right jihadist, even conspiracy theories in particular, they're very good at turning you into a cosmic warrior main character. Right. And so, I mean, conspiracy theories do this a lot where it's like you are now tasked because you've been your eyes have been opened and you've been granted the truth about what's really going on in the world. Everyone else is asleep. You now have a responsibility to wake up everybody to the true reality and get them on a path towards like, liberating humanity. And so the golden age for a lot of these conspiracy theories isn't like a caliphate or white ethnostate, but it's when everyone kind of wakes up, right? Everyone realizes, realizes that, that there's always been this shadowy elite controlling everything. They've never had that much agency. Everything's always been taken away from them or controlled for them. And now we're kind of hip to it. Yeah. Right. And so, yeah, it does create the sense of very deep purpose to kind of help humanity along."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "So you mentioned the caliphate as sort of the end goal for Islamist extremists, the ethnostate for right wing extremists. I remember quite a long time ago on the agenda we had on a X Neo-Nazi and an X Islamist extremist, and they talked about why, why they joined. And it was it was identical. So does the ideology matter as much here or is that almost secondary?"

Amarnath Amarasingam: "The ideology matters for. So when you say like I joined for identity or I joined for group identity or community, the ideology comes in and says, which community. Right. Because if it was just any community, then we can go join a poker league, right?

Habitat for humanity."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "Or habitat for humanity. But no, the community is quarantined in terms of who is the in-group and who is the outgroup. And ideology is important for telling you what that is. Right? Right. So you're a not just a white person, but a proud, racialized, white nationalist, or not just a Muslim, but someone who believes in a very conservative form of Islam, Sunni Muslim, you know. So it tells you what the what the tiers are, and you belong here. That's what ideology does. And so, yes, they're both going after purpose and belonging and meaning, but they ideology makes it very different kinds of meaning and very different communities. So that's what the ideology does. It does the explaining, right? Because community could mean any community, right. But that's not satisfying. Right? Right. And so you're not part of a swim meet, you're part of a, you're part of a group, right? That actually means something."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "I think you mentioned before that it's odd that a lot of people might see, or some people might see Joe Rogan as a Neo-Nazi. And I'm curious in this whole conversation about extremism, and we've talked about the potential for more extremism, I kind of wanted to go the other way on that with as we get more polarized, are you seeing it becoming easier for folks to have a disagreement with someone politically and label that person, see that person as an extremist, as a radical, because I hear the word extremist thrown around a lot when it seems like people are just having a regular political debate."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "I mean, I think this is the natural consequence of like, increased chaos. Yeah. Which naturally leads to kind of finding your group, which tends to be very tribal, right? You tend to have a heightened sense of the in-group in times of chaos, who, who you need to protect. And this happens on the progressive side and on the conservative side, where they believe that it's not just a minor disagreement on tax policy, but you are the epitome of evil. And, you know, we're and your vision for what Canada or America is going to look like is fundamentally evil and bad. And I'm on the side of good, right? And so when everything is non-chaotic, I think you can have very easy political disagreements. But now it's so much of this conversation is elevated to a cosmic level where I think it's becoming harder to just have a conversation, at least on the political space, right? I think interpersonally things are good. Like I, I always see people having very vibrant debates and disagreements in the actual real world. It just doesn't happen on TV or social media. Yeah. Right. And so I think there is a disconnect there sometimes between how people behave in real life and how what it looks like online. But I do think people are becoming a little bit more tribal and politics is becoming more tribal. Yeah, it's become an us and them thing, not like let's work together for the betterment of the country. It's more like who has the right vision for the country and the other, other side needs to go away. That line has been drawn for every mundane issue from immigration down to masks. Right? And so it could be the most minutest issue. And there will be lines drawn. Yeah. Which is not great for our politics, I think. But and so figuring out a way to turn that temperature down is important. I just don't know how you do it with, with the online space and the information space the way that it is."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "I mean, it's just good to remember that. And I think this is good for all journalists. Twitter is not real life.

Twitter is not. Real life. Go and talk to some real people sort of on that."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "And to finish De-radicalization. So once upon a time, ten years ago, these 20 somethings were coming across this ideology on very fringe message boards, right? I think if you smash cut forward to now, it's kind of everywhere. So what is what is De-radicalization look like now and how have we gotten better at it? Is it just is it just more difficult because this stuff is everywhere?"

Amarnath Amarasingam: "I think so at the height of ISIS days, yeah, there was a big disagreement in the space about do we just care about the violence or do we care about what they believe? Right. And so that divide existed between Canada, the US, the UK and other countries where the UK really went down the line of we need to change what they think, right? And so we need to make them moderate Muslims. Right. And whereas in Canada, we just said we don't really care what you believe. We just want to make sure you're not like stockpiling fertilizer, right? And we just want to make sure you're not blowing stuff up. Right. And so that dichotomy got transferred into the far right and is now the now even more acute now, where a whole bunch of people believe all kinds of weird stuff and law enforcement policy, people, prevention types, intervention types don't have the resources to thought police everybody. All we can really focus on is the violent part, right? It doesn't matter what you believe. Are you tipping over into some sort of violence, preparatory violence stage, which we need to keep an eye on. And so that's what the prevention space looks like now. We never really had a prevention space. Even a couple decades ago, it was almost all law enforcement. Whereas now if a 14 year old draws a swastika on a notebook in Canada, which has happened, they might get a visit from the police, but the police might refer them to one of the, you know, one of the few prevention outfits and organizations. And instead of a law enforcement approach, it'll be a counselling approach early too. And it's early. So. So that's what the prevention space looks like. It's the same organizations that are dealing with like the De-radicalization space. So a lot of the people who came back from Iraq and Syria, making sure those kids are back in school, that sort of thing is all done by the same kind of groups. So there's a kind of robust intervention prevention rehabilitation space in Canada, which never existed before. And so they the that. And so they're also having this ideology conversation, which is when you're talking to a 16 year old about who's, you know, draws a swastika on a notebook, what do you do? You kind of talk about the ideology first, right? Or do you talk about their family and their education and their mental health, mental health and all these other things, and then eventually maybe get to the ideology, or maybe after all of that, the ideology will just work itself out. Right. So in an interesting way, I think, I think one of the, in the causal space, in the radicalization space, ideology is still quite important. But in the deradicalization space, ideology is often dealt with like down the line."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "Yeah. Get to the root causes and the ideology might die."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "And the ideology might die. Or in some in what some of these intervention providers will say is ideology is so important that you can't actually do it first before all the trust has been built. Right? Right. And so you have to spend a year building trust with this person and then talk about the ideological part. Because if you go in ideology first, the walls are going to go up and you're not going to have any secondary relationship. Right. And so that so it kind of works both ways. But we the what's new in Canada is we have this kind of infrastructure over the last little while to actually offramp some of these kids right before they before they go into the court system and the prison system."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "So there's that 14 year old early prevention. But if you get a kid coming back or 20 something coming back from Syria or someone steeped in the right wing extremist space, who's, who's a committed believer, if you get them into deradicalization, does it work or is it kind of a coin flip it."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "I wouldn't go as far as coin flip, but I also don't know what work means, right? In the sense of like. In the sense of like, how do you know that it's what does success look like in this space? Right? It's very, it's very, it's very hard to know. So like I have a few former far right people who are acquaintances of mine who I would say have left the movement, have denounced violence, but now in the online space, still say a lot of pro-Trump stuff, anti-immigration stuff, right? Racist stuff. And then so for me, I'm like, oh, like you're a former neo-Nazi still saying racist stuff online. Are you de-radicalized? And, and so that's the challenge is like, how do you know that you're, that you're on the other side of it? He's not violent. Is that enough? Or do you want him to completely become like a liberal Democrat? Does he have to be an NDP supporter, DP voter? Like what is success, right? What does success look like? Yeah. And so, so that's the challenge is, is how long are you going to track these people? And how long are you going to counsel these people? And before you're like, okay, he's denounced violence and that's enough because we have 100 other cases over here who are also urgent. Yeah. And so that's the challenge is, is like, when does it end? Right?"

Producer Eric Bombicino: "Well, it also feels like, I mean, we talked about the need for meaning, purpose, community. These are massive structural things. So, so to, so to get at that stuff feels like it doesn't feel like something that can be done in a de-radicalization program. No."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "No. Yeah.

No, I think broader structural changes need to happen because whatever, whatever this DIY space is, they also go back into society after they reintegrate into society. And so there has to be something there for them. And so there are I mean, I know a few people who came out of prison in the 2000 who one of the things we did was like, help them write a resume. Yeah, show them what an iPhone was because they went to prison. There were no iPhones. They came out of prison and everyone was staring at these rectangular devices. They were like, what is this? What is happening? Right, right. And so reintegration sometimes is very mundane like that, but there has to be something there for them to be feel integrated into. Family has to stay. Family has to have not abandoned them. Friends have to have not abandoned them. Is their work. What does education look like? So it depends. Like there's been great success stories. Yeah. And there's been others who are just kind of languishing."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "What's one thing you'd like to see change in this space when you're when we're looking at the future of, of deradicalization."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "I would say consistent funding, because right now there are a lot of these organizations are like one funding cycle away, one election away from having it all taken away. And so there's no some of them anyway don't have like layers of governmental funding. They have the federal government funding them. There's no provincial funding, there's no municipal funding. There's no integrated into the broader like healthcare environment. So it's very flimsy. And so I would like to see that kind of supported more and made more permanent. But yeah, otherwise and otherwise, I think they're doing a great job. Most of them."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "Hey man, thanks for spending all this time with me. It's always a joy to hang with you."

Amarnath Amarasingam: "Yeah, always. Always good to chat."

Producer Eric Bombicino: "You can catch part one of Eric and Amarnath's conversation on our website at TVO.org or our YouTube channel at TVO Today."