De-radicalizing Extremists From QAnon to Jihad

which is the extremists. When Carlos shot and killed a soldier at a US military recruiting office in two thousand nine, the family struggled with anger and grief. With nowhere to turn, they decided to help others who faced the same question they had. What do you do when a loved one subscribes to a radical idea of g whether it's jihad, white supremacy, q and on or something else. Parents for Peace.

I feel like it's going to bring these families closer so that we can cry on each other showers, and for those that may be questioning what their child are doing, I think this will open their eyes. The demand for the services of Parents for Peace has never been higher. Joining me is Bloomberg Legal reporter David Yaffee Bellini, who's written about the group. David start by telling us about the raid on the house of a young man who

also had been radicalized. This was back in November of and a mother in the southern US who were calling any and the story wakes up to the sound of pounding on her front door at the early hours the morning and outside the house or a group of FBI adem and they've come looking for her teenage son who are calling Jack and the story and the reason is that Jack has been stuck into the world of Islamic radical them online. He's talking in forums with supporters of

the Atlantic State. He's discussing the possibility of attacks on national landmarks like the White House and the Washington Monument, and all of this has gotten the attention of the FBI, which shows up to read the house and see whether there's any sign that Jack is actually preparing to launch

a real terror attack. Was he charged. He was eventually charged in the juvenile court with making terrorist threats against the US and also with essentially obstructing investigation because he deleted a chat app from his phone after the FBI showed up, But ultimately he received a year of probation that says didn't really find any solid evidence that he was actually about to launch this sort of attack. And he was sixteen at the time, so, you know, luckily

for him, the case ended up in juvenile court. His mom said, people understand porn, they don't understand your kid is doing isis. But she was talking about this as an addiction. Yeah, So a lot of people who struggle with extraism and members of extremist groups compare the kind of psychological experiences being part of one of these movements

to an addiction. You know, trying to break out of it produces similar kind of lingering effects as if you're breaking an addiction to drugs or alcohol, and this kind of thrill or the high get from being part of it is also akin to the sort of experiences being

on drugs or being drunk or what have you. And so that's a way of thinking about this problem that anecdotal evidence supports, from which academics are beginning to study in a more systematic way to see if there are lessons of how you can combat this problem that stems from that recognition of their similarities with addiction, and the mom tried all sorts of things before she found Parents

for Peace. Her son Jack is autistic, and people who are autistic are sometimes susceptible to the type of predatory recruitment that can lead to extremism, and so she saw all sorts of treatments for him. Him to a residential

school for kids that behavioral problems. She introduced him to a rotating asks of doctors and therapists to try to treat this problem, and eventually she found a group called Parents for Peace, which is a nonprofit that has been around and which specializes in helping people do radicalize, in that sort of lurring and kind of coaxing them away from extremist groups. How would you describe their treatment method.

It's difficult to describe precisely, but it's somewhere at the intersection of addiction treatment, family counseling therapy, the kind of cult deprogramming efforts of the nineties seventies. It's this sort of hybrid approach. A lot of it is about figuring out what the underlying problem is and trying to address that.

You know, maybe this person is drawn to an extremist group because of their lonely Let's find a way for them to make friends that they get that kind of sense of camaraderie from somewhere other than a dangerous extremist group. Some of it is about coaching the family to respond to the loved ones extremism and productive way instead of freaking out every time they show up you and on

video on their phone. Try to ask them open and the questions about why they're drawn to that video, Try to understand them, show them loves and attention and trying to combat this underlying issue that might make them vulnerable

to conspiracy theories. That's sort of thing and the ultimately what this group will sometime to do is introduce someone who's in an extremist group to a former extremists, somebody who's been in the group and left will kind of mentor them the friend of them and try to coach them away. The woman now in charge, Miriam Churchill, said, I thought this is really interesting. Never argue with extremists, don't react to angrily. It's tough not to try to

argue someone out of something. Yeah, definitely, I mean, certainly the temptation when somebody starts voicing horrible white supremacist ideas or kind of anti vactor sentiment is to fight back and argue and prove them wrong. But what Miriam has found and hurt kind of working with families is that ultimately that's counterproductive. That feeling like you're under assault will just make you want to dig in even further and make you less likely to leave that type of conspiracy behind.

And you know, that kind of makes sense on a sort of intuitive level, and so her advice is not to do that again, to try to kind of understand the underlying problems that might make you susceptible to believe in these things, and then to try to combat those. So extremism is the drug of choice. And in Jack's case, he went from one extreme ideology to another. Yes, so this is something that the group parents or piece actually sees quite a lot, that people will switch from one

ideology to the other. And you know, certainly when I was beginning my reporting, you know, I didn't understand that at all. It seemed it didn't seem to make sense to me how somebody could go from being an Islamic radical one day to being a white supremacist the next day. It didn't fit with my understanding of how this works. But you know, actually when you when you think about

it more deeply, it does makes sense. You know, people are drawn to extremism often not because of the substance of the idea oology, but because being a part of a group filled some sort of spiritual void and and and the substance of the ideology is almost secondary to the experience of subscribing to the ideology at all. And so it makes sense that somebody might switch from from from one form to another, and that's something that the

group seed a lot. So in Jack's kid, you know, with the help of the lessons his mom and some parents or peace and some of his kind of own independent research videos he was watching online, he gradually starts drifting away from Islamic extremism, eventually kind of renounces the Kuran, become a sort of urgently anti Muslim, which is its own sort of problem um. But then also at the same time begins embracing we're at least flirting with light

wing extremism. Um. He gives ancestors who's gone to the Confederacy in the Civil War and starts wearing a Confederate

flag baseball cap everywhere. He decorates his room with Confederate flags. UM. And his mom, you know, doesn't think that he's becoming a white supremacist exactly, you know, not expressing animus towards other races or anything like that, but he is sort of beginning to adopt some of the some of the trappings of white supremacy UM, and you know, at times or like express views that seems that seemed potentially problematic. At one point he uses the phrase white power and

an argument with the sibling. Another time, his mom is sort of urging him to stop wearing his Confederate tap out in public, and he says, no, no, this is my history, this is my heritage. So you can see how that, you know, could easily, especially for someone with his history, turn into um, a real real problem. Do they call it deep programming or does that sound too cultish? Yeah, parents are piece prefers. The term de radicalization, you know,

deep programming. It's never a term that's really been precisely defined, but it's definitely associated with those kind of extreme methods of in eighteen seventies when cult deprogrammers would literally kidnap people who were in cults who subscribes to strange, exotic religious principles that their parents didn't understand. They would kidnap those people and deprived them of food until they were

prepared to leave behind whatever that the cult was. And so a lot of the groups that are doing this type of work now want to stay away from that type of terminology, so they use still use the word radicalization instead. Is there a lot of money in this, So groups like Parents or Peace and another similar group called Life After Hate our nonprofits that don't charge money. They generate income through donations and government grants and those

works of means. But there's also a cadre of for profit deprogrammers de radicalizers out there, and these tend to be the sort of final legacy of that nineteen seventies era.

You know, these are people who are in cults and who then made careers out of deep programming, and they don't use the same extreme techniques at that period, but they charge family tens of thousands of dollars to conduct interventions to kind of insinuate themselves into the life of a cult member and then eventually reveal themselves as you know Ham as deprogrammer. And I'm here to take you away from this, and I'm the persuade you why you

should leave. And this is fraught with risks. Obviously there's no guarantee of success. You could spend twenty thousand dollars one of these projects and then end up no better than when you started. Or I heard stories about the programs botching interventions, and so families leaves a lot of money, and then also their family member who they were trying to help is actually even more alienated ultimately, and so

there are all sorts of problems associated with this. So Stephen Hassan is UM, you know, one of the most well known kind of for profit deep programmers, the radicalizers. He was a member of the Unification Church, you know, back decades ago. You know, he considered a mooney UM. He ended up leaving, leaving that group and starting a career as a as a deep programmer UM. And so he charged his five thousand dollars a day to work with families who are trying to extract somebody from an

extremist group or from you know, a cult. UM. He's recently kind of pivoted more from helping cult members to helping people who are kind of stuck down the you and on rabbit hole. Um. He published a book recently called The Cult of Trump. Um, he's the sort of guy who's on TB all the time talking about how, you know, Trump supporters are brainwashed and that sort of thing. He's basically trafficking in kind of theories about how this works that are disputed by academics and then charging huge

amounts of money to try to help people. I mean, there are certainly, you know, records of that kind of successful cases that that he's worked on. But UM, it's definitely a different, you know, costlier approach than what what other groups are offered. Is that extreme cult deep programming happening anymore. You know, there may be kind of anecdotal examples of that happening occasionally now, but that's it's not happening at anywhere near at the level that it did

in the seventies. And that's partly because there were legal repercussions for the people who were doing this. There were criminal prosecutions, there were civil suits, and and that you know, really kind of changed how this works. Um. And you know it's happening, it's happening much less often, if at all, anymore. When when and when you talk to people who are in the kind of culty programming space now, they don't say, oh,

we would never do anything like that. So as far as groups that are free of charge, how many are they're out there? It's really a handful, you know. I know of two or three off the top and I have there. Maybe there may be others, but it's a very kind of small and and and still sort of growing community. Um. This sort of work is really pioneered

in Europe. In the late nineties, there was an effort in Norway to help right wing extremeists leave these sorts of groups, and it only really these sorts of efforts only really a game traction and that you asked over the last decade. So we're sort of behind where we're Europe is on this type of ward, and some defendants charged in the January six riots are using this idea of de radicalization at sentencing to try to get a more lenient sentence. I mean, this is a fascinating aspect

of this type of work. What you're seeing is that people who are facing prison sentences because of extremist activity are able to say to judges, look, I'm trying to get you outequalise I'm working with a group like Parents for Peace, or I'm re educating myself and reading all sorts of literature about racial inequality in America sentance and

that shows that I deserve a more lenient sentence. It's really similar to someone who's charged with drunk driving who starts going to a meetings and said, so ject, look, I'm trying to get treatment. Give me a lenient sentence and proving to you that if I'm allowed to return to society all behave myself and won't be a threat to other people. Now, of course there's a risk here.

There's a risk of dishonesty and manipulation and people abusing these sorts of resources, and you know, that's something that the courts are going to have to kind of figure out how to sort of protect. And has Parents for Peace been involved in any of these sentencings. The one case that we're we've seen this play out kind of most obviously is in Michigan. Tye Garbon, who was one of the right wing extreamists who was charged with the

Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot back in twenty twenty. He was the first of that group of conspirators to plead guilty, and his lawyers reached out to Parents for Peace and he spoke with the organization over zoom and had various meetings with them talking about his personal history. They were trying to kind of help him get to a place

where he's not further radicalized in prison. And then during his sentencing, his lawyers brought this up repeatedly and argued to the judge that he deserved more leading a sentence. And it's difficult to pinpoint where that outreach fit into the broader picture of his case, but he did end up receiving a sentence that was significantly below the maximum possible that he could have received. It was also because he was the first in this group to police guilty.

He was cooperating that type of thing, but it certainly didn't hurt that he was speaking the sort of help. Is there any study being done to back up that this is a process that works long term? So there's some data from European efforts that suggests that it works pretty well in terms of the work that parents pieces doing.

There's just way less data on that, and it's a real quest and mark they're certainly anecdotal examples of this working, But can they show systematically that they have refined an approach that really addresses this issue in a meaningful way. And they're working with researchers at Harvard and Boston University

who are just now beginning to work. Is like tracking cases over the long term, and that means not just does this person leave the extremist group and reject terrorism or white supremacy or whatever two months later, it's like where are they two years later? Where are they four years later? You know, how does their life change after the group's intervention. That's work they'll take a really long time to do and it's only only really starting now.

How much call is there for this type of intervention. I think there's a huge amount of demand that Parents or Peace saw threefold increase and calls to its national hotline during the pandemic from before the pandemic. You know, it's people stay at home, are spending more time online, you know, all this sorts of phenomena that we're familiar with. And after January six, you're also seeing assert in family seeking treatments for loved ones who are being stuck down

these rabbits. So it's certainly something that's in demand. There's no question that extremism is a big problem in the modern US and that we need to figure out a way to deal with it. And a lot of attention has focused on how do we get social media companies to stop spreading this information that leads to extremism, and that's certainly a big problem and one that needs to

be addressed. But what these groups are trying to do is address a different sort of problem, which is, Okay, you've got a family member who is already an extremist. What do you do then? And that's a complicated question.

Thanks David. That's David Yaffie Bellani, Bloomberg Legal reporter. The demands for justice and police accountability during the demonstrations following George Floyd's murder revived questions about the controversial doctrine of qualified immunity, But this week the Supreme Court sided with police in a pair of cases alleging excessive force by

officers in California and Oklahoma. The Justice has ruled unanimously that the officers were protected by qualified immunity and could not be sued because previous case law hadn't given them clear guidance that their conduct violated the constitution. Joining me as an expert on qualified immunity, Joanna Schwartz, a professor at u c l A Law School, Joanna explain what

qualified immunity is. So. Qualified immunity is a legal defense in civil cases, and the defense means that a police officer or other government official who has violated the Constitution is protected from being sued unless there's clearly established law

showing that what they did was unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court in recent years has offered more and more restrictive descriptions of what it means to clearly establish the law, so that they've now really sent a message that you need a prior court case where the almost exact same thing happened before and ruled unconstitutional in order to clearly establish the law. In both cases, the justices overturned lower court decisions that went against the officers. Can you just

tell us a little bit about the cases. One was from the Ninth Circuit, one was from the Tenth Circuit. They were both cases where police were called about some domestic incident. You know the fact in a slightly difference in the case out of the Ninth Circuit, officers in arresting person put them down on the ground and put

their knee on the person's back, albeit briefly. And in the case out of the Tenth Circuit, the man was near his garage the police arrived, and it sounds like the man sort of stepped back into his garage, had a hammer that he swung sort of like a baseball bat, it says in the opinion, several feet away from the officers, and then the officers shot him. The Court said, it's not enough that rule be suggested by then existing precedent.

The rules contours must be so well defined that it's clear to a reasonable officer that his conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted. Our officers really aware of what these court cases say, or is this standard sort of a ruse on the Court's part. It's a terrific question. I think the shortest answer is it is a bit

of a ruse. When the Supreme Court explains why there needs to be a prior court decision with nearly identical fact, they talk about notice that the officer needs to be unnoticed, that the contours of the constitution are hazy and we need a clear articulation of what is unconstitutional for an officer to be unnoticed. But you are absolutely right. Officers are not educated about the fact and holdings of the court decisions that the Supreme Court says are necessary to

clearly establish the law. And I actually, in an article that was published earlier this year, studied hundreds of policy and trainings for California law enforcement agencies about the use of force, which is the issue that is the basis

for these two decisions. And what I found was officers are trained about the sort of high level framework that the Supreme Court articulated in a case called Grand versus connor about the reasonableness of force depending on the totality of circumstances given the perspective of the officer at the time. But they are not trained about the facts and holdings of the court decisions that the Supreme Court says are

necessary to clearly establish the law. Instead, they're taught those broad principles and taught how to apply them with various hypotheticals that are not drawn some court cases. And if you think for a moment about what it would mean for officers actually to rely upon these prior decisions, it's fantastical. There are hundreds or thousands of opinions that could clearly

establish the law just for use of force cases. And then there's all sorts of other things that police officers and other government officials do that also have our own bodies of case laws. To learn about those cases. You know, in California, you get I think it's twenty four hours every two years of training learning about those cases. Spending just five minutes on those cases would take up all

of the training hours that police officers currently have. And then you have to expect that officers would actually retain and remember the fact and holdings of those cases, and then, in the split second that they are required to make the kinds of decisions that sometimes lead to use as of force, be able to distinguish between the precise facts in these various cases. It simply is fantastical. It is implausible. It makes no sense at all as a standard, and

that is justified by notice goals. And so then what is the purpose? I returned to where you started with your question. It feels like a bit of a route. And in the case here involving the California Police officer, the Ninth Circuit said that existing precedent did put the officer on no notice. And in the case involving the Oklahoma police officers, the ten Circuit pointed to several cases that it said clearly established that the conduct was unlawful.

So are the justices saying, no, there has to be a case that we decided that's exactly on point. Well, the Supreme Court since about has been writing in several different qualified immunity opinions that Supreme Court decisions clearly established the law, but that they'll only assume for the purposes of argument, that Circuit court decisions, Court of Appeals decisions can also clearly establish the law. And they've said this multiple times. They've never actually come out and said that

only Supreme Court cases can clearly establish the law. But every time they issue a decision that has that kind of caveat, it's very shocking and surprising given that the Supreme Court only decides a handful of cases, you know, involving civil rights issues and the ability to sue every year, and when they do, they very rarely rule on the question that the Supreme Court says is necessary to clearly establish the law, which is a ruling on whether the

Constitution was violated. And note that in these cases. In these decisions that the Supreme Court issued where they said there was no clearly established law, there was not a prior court case holding similar conduct on constitutional They also didn't rule on the constitutionality of the conduct in these cases, so they did nothing to clarify the law moving forward. There was no noted dissent. Did that surprise you at all? It didn't. It didn't. There have been rumbling within the

Supreme Court that qualified immunity doctrine should change. Justice Thomas has said that it should be reconsidered. Justice Podo Mayor has said that it sends a message to police that they can shoot first and think later. And there was a decision in November of case called Taylor versus Rio Jus where the Court seemed to be backing away from its most robust description of what clearly established law was.

In that case, which involves prisoner who has kept in a cell for several days that was completely undersanitary, unfit for human habitation. The Supreme Court said, you don't need a prior case for it to be obvious that it was unconstitutional to put this person in these conditions for this amount of time. And when the Supreme Court issued

that decision. I and others who studied this issue thought that it could be a indication that the Court was stepping back from its most extreme descriptions of the doctor

and what was necessary to clearly establish the law. So with these two unsigned unanimous precurium opinions, it seems like the Court was not opening the door quite as widely as I had hoped to a vision of qualified immunity that that didn't require clearly established law at this level of precision that they seem to do in these two cames.

Do you think the differences between police officers, who the court sees is having to make split second decisions and prison guards It could be It certainly is true that the officers in the prison case had a lot more time to deliberate about the steps that they were taking. But then it seems to me like the more sensible answer is to reach the constitutional question and make a decision, issue a decision that can then offer some clarity in

these circumstances. The idea that the Court is recognizing in a comedy, the split second decisions police might make through qualified immunity, which is we've said, is a doctrine based on this idea of notice that has no basis in reality really feels like a missed opportunity for the court to offer some clarity about the law. The doctrine of qualified immunity has come under increased scrutiny following the murder of George Floyd and other acts of excessive force by police.

Does it affect the way police officers act to know that they're basically going to be covered in a civil case afterwards. So one important thing to remember about qualified immunity, and I think it gets obscured a lot in the current debate, is that qualified immunity is not what shields police officers from paying settlements and judgments from their own

bank accounts. It's been described and defenders of qualified immunity has said that it's necessary to protect officers from being bankrupted for lawsuits based on, you know, reasonable mistakes made in a split second. But officers are already protected from having to pay in these cases because states and local governments have what are called indemnification rules and policies that provide that when an officer is stued, their employer will

pay the settlement for judgment. It's a matter of law that they are obligated to do so, and there are some exceptions that are carved out into those statutes when officers have acted maliciously or are criminally prosecuted. But when I studied police and domestication practices around the country, I found that eight percent of the dollars that are paid to people in police as conduct suits come from government budgets, not from police officers bank accounts. So qualified immunity does

not provide that shield. And I think the Fourth Amendment already provides the shield to protect reasonable officers from constitutional violations. So what does ending qualified immunity or what does qualified immunity do, and what would end being qualified immunity do? I think that that qualified immunity right now makes the law unclear for law enforcement and for courts and for

the general public. There are parts of this country where courts have not ruled yet that it is protected by the First Amendment to record the police, a concept that has been critically important to our current conversation about policing and an issue that has been particularly relevant since the

advent of smartphones. But in some parts of the country, courts have not yet ruled on that question, and I think the reason for that can be traced right back to qualified immunity, because courts can grant qualified immunity without ruling on whether the Constitution was violated. And that's just one example of the way in which the law becomes less clear because of qualified immunity. Without qualified immunity, there would be more clarity that could then be incorporated into

police policies and trainings and into our general understanding. And I also agree with Justice so to Mayor that these decisions with qualifying facts, where officers are shielded from liability because there doesn't happen to be a prior court case with virtually identical facts, sends a shoot first, think later message to police. So I think that ending qualified immunity or greatly limiting it would have very important effect for

law enforcement. But it still would not mean that officers would be personally financially responsible for paying settlements and judgments in these cases, or that they would be found to have violated the Constitution when they made reasonable mistakes. So it seems like the likely path to change this qualified immunity doctrine is through legislation. Do you see that happening at the state level. I know that there are I

think seven state qualified immunity bills have been enacted. There is motion and activity on the state level, and I think that the gold standard really is Colorado, where a bill was passed in June, right after the murder of George Floyd, and I think, buoyed by a sort of shared sentiment in that moment that something really needed to change. I think that their bill is the most ambitious, But there have been other bills that have followed in New Mexico and in New York City and some other places

as well. There have also been many states in which qualified immunity bills have been introduced, and there have been hearings. I've participated in some of those hearings, and they have been shelved for the moment or rejected really in each time based on what I consider to be groundless fears about bankrupt officers and lawsuits that challenge reasonable conduct, of the typical fears about what a world without qualified immunity would look like that that are not based in reality.

Is there anything happening on the federal level. In the summer of the House passed the George Flood Justice and Policing Act, which included, among many, many different provisions and ends to qualified immunity, and that did not move forward. Then, nearing the anniversary of George Flood's murder, that bill was reintroduced and re passed in the House, and again it

stalled in the Senate. In the summer of tim Scott described qualified immunity reform as a poison pill to the negotiations, and in one it seemed perhaps that there was going to be some common ground for a shift to qualified immunity, a limitation to qualified immunity, But the negotiations in that bill have fallen apart as well. Thanks for being on the show, Joanna. That's Professor Joanna Schwartz of u c l A Law School. And that's it for the sedition

of the Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law podcast. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www dot Bloomberg dot com, Slash podcasts, Last Law. I'm Shun Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg