This podcast is for general information only and should not be taken as psychological advice.

Listeners should consult with their healthcare professionals for a specific medical advice.

Well.

Hello, I'm Amanda.

Keller and I'm Anita McGregor, and welcome to Double a Chattery.

We thought we'd do something a bit different today.

The world is in a strange place, isn't it, Anita?

It is?

It is, and we.

Are jumping into it today, aren't we.

Well, this is the thing.

We're going to talk to a guy called Jeff Scoop.

He is a former neo Nazi, so much so he was fully embedded in New York's biggest chapter of Nazis, if that's how you phrase that.

For twenty seven years he was involved in recruiting kids the full gamut of what most of us will recoil at in absolute horror.

He is now through that he has deradicalized.

He has been deradicalized and tries to do exactly the same for others.

And at first, when you think about talking to a neo Nazi of any kind, I think I'm not interested, don't want too scary.

Scary, horrible, absolutely.

But maybe, as you say, Anita.

It's time to jump in and meet in the middle and find what the solutions are.

So let's talk to former neo Nazi leader Jeff Scoop.

Most of us were absolutely horrified at recent images at Australian rallies.

It seems to us the rise of neo Nazism.

But maybe it's just the brazenness within which they took to lecturns and marched quite openly.

Should we be surprised at this, No, these.

Are extremist groups.

You know, they want to be you know, they are the small minority, but they want to be loud and obnoxious.

And this works across the spectrum no matter what kind of extremist group you're dealing with.

They want to be upfront, loud and heard, and unfortunately, what that does is it drowns out a lot of the moderate voices and the people that are out there for legitimate reasons.

Jeff, what I'm kind of curious about is that so I'm Canadian, I've been here for almost twenty years, and what I've really noticed is that there's a rhetoric against around immigrants, around refugees, around you know, the you know, the same rhetoric that we hear, I think in the States about lazy and you know, routing the system and all those kinds of things.

Should we be surprised that people who may have been moderate in their views around immigration, that they have moved towards more kind of radical beliefs like our like?

Should we be surprised because we've been telling people that immigrants are evil for for twenty you know, for twenty years or so, should we be surprised?

I mean my experience, a lot of the immigrants that you know, First of all, I'm the son of a German immigrant, you know, so you know, my mother my family worked very very hard, and a lot of the immigrants that I know, you know, they've they've struggled, they've worked very hard.

And I think that's a something that a lot of people are not understanding.

You know that One thing I've been told by a number of immigrants is that they feel like they have to work ten times as hard because they need to prove that they're, you know, worthy of being in the country and things like that.

So, but I think a big problem is there's a difference between immigration and coming over the right way and then coming over illegally.

I know, here that's a big problem with with the illegal immigration.

You know, we welcome immigrants, but we don't welcome illegal immigrants because that's breaking the law.

And you know that's that's a concern.

But ask your question, you know, are people getting more radical?

I guess it really depends on the individual, because some people are getting more radical, and there's a term for that.

It's called reciprocal radicalization.

And that is where both sides are getting more radical and they're being pulled away from the middle, whether they're right or left, but they're being pulled out to those extremes.

And those are some of those loud voices.

They're not the majority, but those are the loud voices, and they're the ones that we tend to be hearing more of unfortunately.

Well let's go back to your life, Jeff.

How did you become a neo Nazi?

How does that?

What was the process for you?

Well, my journey in was a little different than a lot of people.

For a lot of people, it's a sense of belonging, it's being a part of something.

For me, it was a family connection.

And I say that with a caveat.

You know, it wasn't the family was not recruiting me into it.

But my grandfather had fought in the German army during World War Two, and my great uncles did as well, and my grandparents became well, you know, the male relative were all ended up in pow camps.

And you know, my grandmother and her family ended up displaced because they were from Prussia, so that was a part of the German country that was given over to Poland after the war, so they were displaced and like most all the Germans from that area.

And I heard about that growing up.

So I felt like my family had been wronged, and you know, I looked up to my grandfather and I wanted to be you know, I wanted to fight for my country and fight for my people.

And it's not an excuse, it's not the right, you know, it's not a good reason for going in, but that was the trajectory for me.

And once you become involved and you become propagandized, you become These movements are very cult like nobody that's involved, including when I was involved.

If you would have told me this is a cult, I would have denied it.

I would have said, you're wrong, you don't know what you're talking about.

I could tell you when I was when I was dating.

It was one after another.

They were like, Jeff, this is a cult You're involved in a cult group, and I'm thinking, man, why am I making these poor choices women?

But really it was me that was the problem and they couldn't see it.

So this is very common for a lot of people that are involved in it, because this becomes your world, it becomes all encompassing.

It's an echo chamber.

All you're hearing is what's inside that bubble or that echo chamber, and you know, seeing what's outside of it.

Everybody's just wrong, is how you view it.

So radicalization happens quite fast in those a lot of those scenarios.

So, Jeff, I've been a forensic psychologist for over thirty years and worked with gang members and people who have been radicalized.

And the question that I'm always curious about is that in your own story, Jeff, is there a point, Is there a time, and especially given that it was within your family, that somebody could have said something or done something that would have turned you from that path.

You know, it's a good question.

And my family really tried actively and hard to discourage me from this, and my parents kept telling me that I was wrong.

My involvement in this stuff like destroyed my mother's career.

It was.

It was a NonStop downhilled spiral for myself and everybody attached to me, and I didn't see it what it was like, every lash of the proverbial whip made me more entrenched, more more dedicated to it.

Now I felt like the government and the system and everybody else was going after my family for my beliefs.

So that just made me more radical and more angry.

So everybody tried my grandfather as well.

You know, he says, you're Jeff, the path that you're on is going to lead to one or two places, prison or death.

And my response to him was, oh, but you know, you might have surrendered, you might have given up, but I'll never stop fighting for my people.

I don't care if they kill me.

I don't care if they throw me in prison, because that's how radicalized I was.

Now, what was that moment?

You know, what was that breaking point?

What was it that reached me?

It was something It was seeing the humanity in the people that had once vilified So like I was told in school and peers and all these people outside of the movement.

What I was doing was wrong my family and everyone else.

But that didn't work, that didn't get through.

So I don't know, you know, like that's something I've thought about a lot, Like what if that meeting, What if those meetings would have happened years before?

Because I was in this stuff twenty seven years, Like, what if that had happened earlier, would it have made a difference.

That's a tough question.

That's when I struggle with a lot, and that's you know, we'd like to figure that out.

And in the process of pulling people out, I always say not to tell people that they're wrong, because you get an instant pushback with that.

We want to show people how they're wrong.

Let them come to that conclusion, because force change isn't real change.

Real change has to come from the heart and from the mind.

And if a person thinks that or believes that they're being coerced or forced into it, like your wife says, Hey, if you don't quit this movement, I'm going to take the kids.

And I saw this for decades in the movement, and vice versa on the other you know, on the other side of it as well, and that didn't work.

You know, sometimes you know, somebody might you know, bend to it, but they're not changing.

They still have those beliefs.

They have to see it and they have to feel it, and then it's going to change because they've done that.

So a lot of times when people ask us, you know, like well, how many people have you personally deradicalized?

Like how many people have you you know, fixed you know, or repaired this this thinking from?

And my answer to that is, I mean we've helped you know, probably hundreds of people.

But the thing is is they've made that change.

We just helped them get there.

When you said it was finding the humanity, what exactly does that mean?

What was how do you do that when you're so strong about your beliefs.

I'm glad you asked that, you know, because the people that are involved in this, they think that they're doing something good and noble, you know, like I was.

I joined this because I wanted to be part of a cause that was important.

I wanted to save my country.

I wanted to save my people, So that was the mindset.

So what it was specifically was sitting down with people that I had once dehumanized, not them personally like I hadn't personally dehumanized them, but people from other groups, you know, like an African American and a Muslim woman.

And when they talked about first of all, they were very respectful, very kind, and conversations are reciprocal, they're going back and forth.

And the first person I had sat down with that I feel like planted the first major seeds as a man by the name of Darryl Davis.

He's an African American musician, played with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, all these rock and roll blues legends.

And when I sat down with them, he was talking about how the racism had affected him as a young man and how he was the only African American child in this boy Scout parade and he was being pelted with rocks by white adults and that that didn't sit well with me.

That that really bothered me.

And like that are if that belief system is causing people to do things like that, and then you try to compartmentalize, you go, well, that wasn't my organization.

I didn't do that.

Those guys were scumbags, you know, uh to do that to a kid, But the cause is still right, that's the that's the psychology of it.

That's the mental the way, the way I tried to in the way a lot of people in these movements try to compartmentalize that stuff.

And some people would just say, oh, so what you know.

But I was always a little bit more compassionate, I guess in that sense.

But it really depends on the individual.

But when you see the humanity and the person that you're sitting across from like that, it's not some far away thing like a history lesson or or something that's that you can detach from.

You're sitting across from somebody and you can feel that, you can sense that, and you can see it, and that is that's a hard Uh, that's a hard thing to unpack, I think, you know.

And and again I wish it would have changed, like the snap of a fingers, that's very rare.

It takes a lot of contemplation.

Yeah, I know a fust or a few scenarios where people changed in with one act of kindness.

But I can count those on one hand.

And I know hundreds of people that I've left, but all of them took time.

So it's it's not as common as I wish it was.

It sounds as though the process is a lot about planting seeds.

It really is, you know.

And the Muslim lady that I had met soon after Darryl, she the way she approached me, and I think this is important because other people can use this and they're if they're struggling with these kind of things as well.

And she had said to me, she goes, she never once told me that I was wrong, but she said to me, she says, Jeff, the belief system that you have, what you believe in caused me growing up, caused me to feel less than ugly, not worthy.

And it's like I could see it in her face.

I could feel it like a vibe, like an energy in the air.

And that hurt.

That really really hurt.

And you know, it's not something that people that are in that life wann't admit, but it hurt deep down.

So with all these issues we're having with young men looking to believe in something, needing to feel strong, needing to feel something bigger than themselves, how do you even plant that seat?

How do you get them around that table?

What steps do you take now to help them?

A lot of times for people, you know, it's like I don't suggest people you know, go up to the nearest Nazi rally and go and try to talk to them, because that's not the place to do it.

It really isn't.

You know.

They're around their peers.

They're not gonna listen, they're just gonna holler back at you or be angry.

But if you can get people in one on one situations, and this is where family members, friends, educators, anybody else that does this kind of work can come into play and show the people like how they're wrong.

You know, don't tell them they're wrong, but show them how they're wrong.

So a lot of times that comes with curiosity that comes with having conversations.

In the case of like the work I do with my nonprofit Beyond Barriers, a lot of people will reach out.

And I was very high profile when I was in the movement, so they if you were in the movement, you know who I was.

So they'll reach out and they'll be curious, like, well, why did you get out?

You know, did the Jews have something on you?

Did the government have something on you, or something like that.

That's the first thing that goes into their mind because they cannot fathom that somebody could just leave and change from that life, So you know, I kind of talk them through that.

I feel like, if they're reaching out and they're asking questions and they're curious, there's a window open.

There's a door open that change can be made in.

And one of the most common questions they ask and sometimes, you know, some of this stuff comes in it's a little offensive, and you know, if they're threatening to kill me or something, I'm not engaging in that.

But if they just say other offensive things, I'll typically still speak with them and they'll say, oh, so you left the movement, now you're a commune, you know, are you a communist now?

Or if someone leaves the movement, they must be antifa because in this world there's no gray areas.

Everything is like black and white, no pun intended.

Everything is on the extreme.

So like, if you leave the far right, they're assuming now you're on the far left.

And there's some people that do that, but that's not a de radicalized extremist.

That's just somebody that's flipping one one extremism to another.

So I at first, you know when I was when I left, and I'm getting like dozens of emails and calls and stuff like are you a communist now, and I'm thinking, my gosh, what in the world am I saying?

That is making people think that I'm getting upset about it, you know, and I'm thinking, man, I must be saying something really crazy that they think this.

But it wasn't me.

I thought that way too, of anybody that left, because when I was involved, I mean, you know, so I realized that they are thinking in those extremes and you have to talk with them.

You have to say, no, I'm not a communist.

In fact, I'm not even I'm not even way over there on the left.

And you know, if you leave, you don't have to be either.

And they're just like, you've just unveiled this grand epiphany that nobody would have ever thought of.

And it's so simple.

But it's that taking that time and that patience to have those conversations and say, look, you don't have to do that.

And now a lot of them will say, well, so and so that's a former they're with Antifa now And I said, they're not the radicalized.

That's so many just flipped extreams.

So and then they go, ha, really, so you don't have to, you know, do all these things.

And just having that patience to talk with them, because I found that that's really really helped a lot of people.

Jeff, So, for twenty seven years, you identified as a neo Nazi.

That was your identity.

How how do you identify now?

Like what you know, what identity do you have for yourself?

Like you could call yourself an ex neo Nazi, but I I'm hearing that maybe your identity is a little bit different than that.

Yeah, and that's that's a that's a good question too, because a lot of us that do this work, you know, it's like that's not who we are, that's not that's not our Yes, it's what we do or that's who we were, but like what we are now is something different.

So I don't know, that's I mean, it's a it's a lot, it's a lot to unpack the question.

I guess you could say.

But I think what gives me meaning and purpose now is the work that I'm doing now.

So and this is important for a lot of people that are getting out, is they need to have something else that gives them that purpose.

And like I was talking to another guy the other day that's that we're working with, and he's kind of on the fence.

He's not out completely yet, and he's like, you know, you know when we were in the movement together.

You know, you went around the country and you were speaking and things like that, and you're still kind of doing that.

It's just in a different realm now.

And he says me, I left the movement, but you're still not the radical.

He's like, I left the movement and now I have nothing, Like I need to find that something so I mean, and that is a really really common thing because people were taking like their time off work and their vacations and things like that to come and do movement events, and now they lost that.

They lost that so called community.

They lost all those people that were around them, and they've a lot of them have been ostracized from their families and it's a very lonely road at first.

So you have to find that you have first of all.

That's one of the reasons why I set up the nonprofit was to make sure that people would have some kind of community, that they'd have people that have been through it, that they could talk through this stuff and have somewhere to go.

And then we try to help them find whatever that purpose might be.

You know, one guy I know he learned to play guitar.

Another young lady, I know, she does extreme sports like jumping out of planes and things like that, you know, to get that adrenaline rush.

You know, for someone else it's the church.

You know, it's different things for different people, but you know, we try to find healthy things that they can repurpose in.

And what I'm hearing from what you're saying as well, is that as as outsiders like us, when we see a Nazi, it's like seeing a funnel web.

You instantly know scary, scary, and yet we need the humanity to meet them somewhere along the line if we ever want to change that behavior us just being combative isn't and frightened of them isn't going.

To do that.

You're right, and a lot of them, you know, they like that fear factor that they seem scary and things like that, and you know, if you can kind of disarm that and see the person underneath the symbols and see the humanity in them as well, because you know they're not seeing the humanity because once you dehumanize somebody, you know, you lose your own humanity, and that process it's not gone forever.

But that's literally what it does is it takes away your humanity.

So they're accustomed to people being nasty to them, people scowling at them, not being friendly, and sometimes when that's like, those small acts of kindness can really break through and kind of open that person up.

And especially like in the work you're doing with psychology and things, I'm sure you know exactly what I'm talking about as far as that goes.

And the other piece that I think is important what you were noting is the idea of what we call replacement theory, which is if you're going to get somebody just stop drinking, you know, what are they going to be doing with their time?

And it sounds so that's exactly what you're doing.

Is if they're leaving from something that was so well consuming, what else can they do.

Maybe it is playing the guitar or doing something else, but they need to be able to find something that will be fulfilling.

It's critical, It really is critical.

Yeah, i'd suggest cross stitch.

I don't even do it, but I think take up some cross stitch, make some cushion covers.

Especially out really nasty words.

On oh that's actually cross stitches where words I would do that.

Oh, absolutely do that.

Yeah, this has been really lovely talking Jeff.

It's just it's so great to to see the you know, the arc of your story and to see that you have come around and it sounds as though your life now is about seeing about how you can make repair, about how you can work towards and your credibility and being able to do that is really he's really quite amazing.

So thanks, thank you, ladies.

Well, it's time for our glimmers in light of that, discover that extraordinary discussion we just had.

I mean, wasn't that amazing?

You know, I'm feeling, I don't know, a little bit hopeful about the world right now.

What it said to me was that thing of we need to meet in the middle.

You can never change anything until you let your own I'm talking about myself, my own prejudices go.

I'll always be prejudiced against Nazis, funnily enough, but unless I step in, and he said, a random act of kindness or humanity can change everything.

It's amazing that encrusted.

Well, speaking of that, which this is my this is the reason I mentioned cross stitch, and it's my glimmer.

Is you know, I'm not a crafty person, Anita.

I know that I'm not a hobby person.

You are not, And yet I sent away for two very small cross stitch kits.

One is a little tin of sardines and one's a little mini lobster.

And they arrived this morning.

And I want to be that person.

Hummy, does thines you when you ordered these?

Well, I saw them, maybe I did see them late at night, and I thought, that looks like the kind of thing I want to do when I'm relaxing and not doom scrolling and doing some incredibly cute craft.

Don't hold me to having to do it.

I was brought into the promise of being the person who might.

I am going to ask you in a year to go and find them for me.

And I'm going to find task.

I'm going to find a task between now and then and get someone to do it, and I'll say, look at it.

I finished and framed it and everything and everything.

I well well done, Amanda.

It starts with one small step.

As we just heard from Jeff, it all starts with one small step step and a bit of humanity from you.

Would it kill you?

Yeah?

I kind of.

Glim my glimmer is is this is not exactly crafty.

But we had occasion on the other day when I was taking care of Logan that to have a box in the house at quite a large box.

And I've got to say, there's something about a two year old and a box.

We we draw fort fort we had.

We put a pool in the middle of it.

We drew, you know, with with all kinds of felt markers all over it.

We yeah, it was.

It was at least several well several hours of hilarious and total joy.

Oh I love it in a box.

I was always the person who wanted to keep every box and my mother didn't want me to.

And I now live with someone, my husband, Harwie, who wants to keep every single box.

Yep.

And where do you like?

Yeah, exactly, like exactly Anita, Oh yeah, got a two year old in a box?

Is a great combination, great combination.

And we could throw it, we could recycle it the next day.

Perfect love that We see you next time I see you.

H