Just two weeks after rioters stormed the nation’s Capitol, security forces have been on high alert across the country, including in New Hampshire. While there’s been no violence since the insurrection, that doesn’t mean the threats posed by extremists and white nationalists have gone away with the inauguration of President Biden and a new administration.
Christina Cliff, assistant professor of political science and security studies at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, gave her thoughts on extremism in New Hampshire and what may come next.
Q. White nationalism and extremism is not new to New Hampshire. Can you walk us through some of that background? What groups do we have here and how active are they? What’s some of the history there?
A. New Hampshire and the New England region in general has a long history of having some level of extremism and white nationalism. Some people will remember a few years ago, a man in Maine tried to start a new “White Homeland.” We do have some organizational groupings, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, a few white supremacist organizations, but they’re not the old-school groups. What we see much more often now are people connected via belief systems, but it’s not a functional, organized group per se. There’s no membership, there’s no joining, and there’s no meetings.
Q. If these groups are not organized, are they more or less of a threat than others in other states that are?
A. What we’re really seeing is what’s called decentralization, and what it means is that people are chatting in online spaces. They will meet up in real life, but it’s not this functional, organized group. The KKK used to issue member cards. We don’t see that anymore, but what you also see is that it’s not location-specific. That means that extremists in New Hampshire will chat with extremists in Michigan and will chat with extremists in California. It’s actually a much larger network in many ways than historically it would have been.
There are both positives and negatives in terms of security concerns in that manner. We see a lot less group formation, with the notable exceptions of Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, etc., but that also means that individuals may choose to act on their own. They may decide that they need to follow their beliefs in a manner that is more reminiscent of what we would think of as a mass shooting incident.
Q. We know that this ideology exists here. What do leaders of our state do to address it? How do we as communities address that?
A. First of all, you have to have a factbased approach to anything and always be recognizing and reiterating facts.
The other part of that, though, is that we have to be willing to say “that’s not a fact.” This is not to say that every time you hear somebody say something wrong, you should confront them, but we do need to have a consistent, coherent message from leadership.
That includes government leadership, that includes community leaders, and that includes community influences. They could be churches, social groups, your town Facebook page, from the political leaders themselves. You really have to be an active listener and engage with people to understand where they’re at, because until you understand who is buying into extremist beliefs, we really can’t help walk them back.
Q. How should we be talking about extremist views and ideas, whether it’s in the media or with our kids or in our schools?
A. One of the really important things to understand is that you absolutely can disagree with people. Not everybody has the same opinions and not everybody has the same approaches to things, but when you are creating beliefs that are deliberately not just exclusionary but hostile to another group of people, now you’re heading into extremism, and that’s where it can get incredibly dangerous.
If you’re talking to kids, little kids completely understand what it’s like to be left out at recess or left out at lunch. What extremism does is create pockets of people that are consistently left out at recess and left out at lunch, and they’re hostile to those people.
It’s not just, “We don’t play with that kid,” it’s “We’re going to make fun of that kid” as well. If you talk to them about that, and they understand how hurtful that is, then they’ll understand why extremism is dangerous.
Q. What advice do you have for the media in covering extremism in New Hampshire? In other words, how do you cover it without repeating the misinformation, and how do you talk about these groups with these ideologies?
A. We have to have it as part of our conversation if we want to combat it. The flipside of that, of course, is you do not want to give them publicity, and you do not want to give credibility to their arguments.
One of the things I always recommend is, if possible, reach out to experts on particular groups or particular ideologies. There’s a lot of people doing research on extremism and most are extremely willing to talk to the media about their specific interests and findings. You just want to be really, really careful. The minute you give it more oxygen, it has potential to grow.
Q. What do you think we’ll see when it comes to extremism in New Hampshire?
A. I would really like to see the New Hampshire government take it seriously. I don’t know that we have; in fact, I know we haven’t in New Hampshire and New England in general.
If we’re not going to take it seriously, the potential is that you have a violent incident that we could have stopped, or maybe could have prevented, if we had just paid a little bit more attention to it on the ground, in our backyard.
Q. What would taking it seriously look like? At a government level, what would they do?
A. I think we need to recognize that white supremacy and extremism in general are a domestic security threat; the Department of Homeland Security and FBI have done this already. If that’s the case, then our government needs to be paying attention.
When experts say that they’re seeing chatter that’s increasing white supremacist chatter, we need to pay more attention to those low-level crimes. We need to put the time and resources into investigating those because those can be an indicator of active extremism in an area.
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