Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Politics & government

BREAKING HATE

Christian Picciolini

Confronting the New Culture of Extremism

Drawing on profiles of extremists that he works to free from violent ideology and on his own painful history leading and then escaping from an infamous neo-Nazi group, Breaking Hate explains why terrorism and violence have come to characterize our daily lives and why that doesn't need to be the case.

At fourteen, Christian Picciolini was recruited by a now notorious skinhead leader and encouraged to fight with the movement to "protect the white race from extinction." Soon, he had become an expert in racist ideology, a neo-Nazi terror who roamed the neighborhood, quick to throw fists. By the time he left the movement years later and was able to see clearly for the first time, Picciolini found that his life was in shambles and the nation around him was coming apart.

Told with startling intimacy and compassion, Breaking Hate is the inside story of how extremists have taken the reins of our political discourse and a guide to how everyday Americans can win it back. The forces pushing to polarize and radicalize us are many--from fake news to coded language to Russian trolls to a White House that often aims to inflame rather than to heal. Increasingly, the information with which we construct our world views is segregated by social media stars and advertisers with murky motives to validate our worst impulses. As Picciolini demonstrates, our modern world systematically normalizes extremism in such a way that we grow blind to it, only recognizing it in the wake of tragedy.

Christian Picciolini is an award-winning television producer, a public speaker, author, peace advocate, and a former violent extremist. After leaving the hate movement he helped create during his youth in the 1980s and '90s, he began the painstaking process of making amends and rebuilding his life. Christian went on to earn a degree in international relations from DePaul University and launched Goldmill Group, a counter-extremism consulting and digital media firm. In 2016, he won an Emmy Award for producing an anti-hate advertising campaign aimed at helping people disengage from extremism. Christian's life since leaving the white-power movement over two decades ago has been dedicated to helping others overcome their own hate. He now leads the Free Radicals Project, a global extremism prevention and disengagement network. He has spoken all over the world, including on the TEDx stage, sharing his unique and extensive knowledge, teaching all who are willing to learn about building greater peace through empathy and compassion. Christian's involvement in, and exit from, the early American white-supremacist skinhead movement is chronicled in his memoir White American Youth. His disengagement work is spotlighted in his MSNBC documentary series Breaking Hate. On February 25, 2020, Picciolini will publish his follow-up book, Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism.

Available products
Book Published 2020-02-25 by Hachette Book Group - New York (USA)

Comments

Breaking Hate is a groundbreaking book. It reveals the depths of the modern white-power extremist movement and illustrates how easily the children of good-hearted, proud Americans can become transformed and corrupted. A sorrowfully necessary book for the dark period America has found itself in.

Riveting, horrifying, and hopeful, Breaking Hate provides a careful and detailed account of how to stop society's death spiral into extremism, and when we need it most urgently.

With piercing insight and unrivaled compassion, Breaking Hate tells the tragic story of how extremism has torn our communities asunder and how every American can work together to end the epidemic of violence that has taken so many of our loved ones. In a country where more than 96 percent of mass shootings are perpetrated by men, we need to find ways of helping our boys grow into healthy young men who not only reject hate but also feel they have paths forward in today's economy.

Christian Picciolini changed the way I see the seduction of hate groups and the vulnerable people lured into them. Let him do that for you, too.

Gripping and timely...Written with authority and first-hand experience...Breaking Hate is filled with rare insights that put today's rise of white supremacy into perspective - and shows us how to stop it.

A rare, exquisitely narrated tale of journeys to the edge and back, Breaking Hate illuminates a creeping danger that threatens to polarize American society and split it asunder. It documents Christian Picciolini's inspired efforts to turn back a tide of hate about to engulf us all. A must-read for anyone who cares to understand what feeds violent extremism, and how it can be countered.

This riveting narrative portrays on an intensely personal level the impacts of extremism. Encouragingly, it also identifies a method for recovery. Picciolini's experience and practice reinforce the truism that hate is a learned behavior, and it can be unlearned. Breaking Hate should be required reading for all citizens who care about dangerous behavior, want to understand it, and are committed to reducing it.

At a time when the bonds of multiracial democracy and pluralism are being torn by political strife, growing hate group activity, and acts of white-supremacist terrorism, Christian Picciolini provides us a roadmap to a new sense of community and justice.

Those who ignore Picciolini's agonizing and dire warnings about the pervasive and systematic alt-right movement, do so at all of our peril. We must instead listen intently to what he is telling us, and internalize his poignantly told personal story and fervent efforts to repair fractured souls lost to forces beyond their control. Our survival as a civil society may depend upon it.