Deradicalizing domestic extremists
Psychologists are using their expertise in human behavior to identify ways to deradicalize and disengage domestic extremists.
www.apa.org
As the United States reconciled itself to the inevitability of defeat in Afghanistan, a vacuum was created within the halls of the security state. How could it continue to violate the rights of its citizens -- particularly their privacy rights -- and accrue ever more power when there was no more "terrorist threat" to ostensibly protect them from?
Cue the hysteria surrounding "domestic terror" incidents, with a mere riot at the US Capitol being blown out of proportion into an "insurrection" so as to give rise to a new industry, based on making political dissidents inside of the country, rather than outside of it, into the new "terrorists."
It does not surprise me in the slightest that this industry should find its caretaker in the field of psychology, because psychology pioneered the erosion of privacy within liberal-democratic societies in the first place (eroding an ethic of privacy before the government went to work on eroding privacy rights). Psychotherapy, after all, is based on the premise that your private sphere of life should be completely laid bare. You are meant to reveal everything to a therapist, a sort of bureaucratic plenipotentiary turned spy, who catalogues the details like an NSA server and leverages it to manipulate you into line.
Hence the main imperative for this budding industry, which will grant it the majority of its income, is "de-radicalization" methods and their application -- an attempt to manipulate so-called "radicals" into becoming moderates, or, rather, "disengaged."
It is interesting in this regard to reflect on the etymology of the term "radical," and its corollary, "moderate," in the US political vernacular. It comes from the geopolitics of the Cold War, where US allies in the Middle East (reactionary monarchies) were called "moderate," unlike Soviet-allied secular leftist governments (the "radicals"). Note that it's clearly just propaganda and has nothing to actually do with the realities on the ground, and this same rule applies to "domestic terrorism" or "de-radicalization" research.
All discourse on "radicalism" or "terrorism" is simply meant to apply a negative connotation onto those whose power or will to power you do not recognize as legitimate. Hence not even a week after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the new Taliban government was already terming regional Tajik separatists as "terrorists!" But anyway, I find it fascinating how the term "moderate" has seemingly been eschewed, our new "domestic terror" charlatans opting instead for the designation of "disengaged." It is a telling term, implying that apathy and docile acquiescence are official priorities. And, moreover, it reveals absolutely no tolerance for dissent, even if tempered or moderated. Indeed, in the article you can read the admission that those who drop out from "radical politics" rarely do so because they've changed their mind; rather, they've just become demoralized:
This reveals the type of priorities they will have (like promoting infighting/factionalism).
Insofar as incels will be targeted by de-radicalization methods, they are worth examining in more detail.
A few things of note in the article:
One method that psychologists praise is priming (or inb4ing) "radical" messages such that they trigger narcissistic defenses in people. This is the height of irony, of course. But the way it works is communicating to them, for example, that they are "too smart" to fall for "extremist" propaganda (unlike state and media propaganda, apparently)
Psychologists are so impressed by the efficacy of this approach that it seeps into their own language:
You don't want to be vulnerable to those radicals, do you?
Whenever you're dealing with a psychologist, always pay attention to word games like this. They are not speaking in honest, objective terms (like one would expect from actual scientists) but attempting to manipulate, even in their own discourse meant for other psychologists!
Besides triggering narcissistic defenses ("I won't let those damned domestic terrorists control me"
), interestingly enough a replication or reverse engineering of the psychodynamics which create mass-opposition to vaccine mandates ("I won't let the state tell me to get the jab"), another popular method is playing on cognitive dissonances. The article provides an example of this when it comes to White ethnonationalism:Psychologists find that personalizing the political is a good way to make people feel cognitively dissonant. How can you speak of problems surrounding Black people such as crime rates (Black crime definitely being more of a threat to the safety of Americans than "domestic terrorism") when you ate fried chicken with a Black guy once?
This method is also used on incels: namely, how can you speak ill of women when you love your mother? Is your mother also a "foid?"
Another matter is the article's bias in favor of liberals who might be thought of as "radical":
The line they draw is that violence in the service of ideology is only justified when it is done by the state, and the social changes it enforces.
And finally, there's the CBT framework that the research is poised to take:
Rather than examining political "radicals" on the basis of their political beliefs, these are a priori considered "wrong" and instead a testament to cognitions gone awry.
Instead of asking why people believe what they do, study the effects of social media on "cognitions" so that further social media censorship is justified.
A good grift.
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