Christian Picciolini

Christian Picciolini is an Emmy Award-winning director and producer, a published author, TEDx speaker, global peace advocate, and a reformed extremist. His new memoir is White American Youth: My Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Movement--and How I Got Out. From the transcript of his Fresh Air interview with Dave Davies:

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. We're speaking with Christian Picciolini. As a teenager, he was recruited into a violent white supremacist group. He became a prominent leader and the frontman for a white supremacist punk band. He left the movement after eight years and now works to get others out of hate groups. He has a new memoir called "White American Youth."

You know, you spent a lot of time traveling around the country as you rose in prominence in the movement. You went to Germany and toured there with the band with some groups there. And there's a point where you give a really evocative description of the skinhead rally where you say, it begins with speeches, and there's lots and lots of beer-drinking throughout and then, you know, frenzied, you know, music and then eventually, sooner or later, fights break out among different groups who are in attendance or because someone was jealous over a romantic approach to somebody's girlfriend. It doesn't exactly sound like people were trying to put together a strategy for change, right? Either winning elections, or armed revolt or much of anything other than coming together and having these moments with each other which often ended in violence.

PICCIOLINI: Well, I don't think that that's correct. I do think that there were a lot of concerted strategies in the '80s and '90s that we're seeing take hold today. We recognized in the mid '80s that our edginess, our look, even our language was turning away the average American white racist, people we wanted to recruit. So we decided then to grow our hair out, to stop getting tattoos that would identify us, to trade in our boots for suits and to go to college campuses and recruit there and enroll to get jobs in law enforcement, to go to the military and get training and to even run for office.

And here we are 30 years later and we're using terms like white nationalist and alt-right, terms that they came up with, by the way, that they sat around and said, how can we identify ourselves to make us seem less hateful? Back in my day when I was involved, we used terms like white separatists or white pride. But it certainly was neither one of those. It was white supremacy and - as is white nationalism or the alt-right...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue