Donald Trump is famous for his unvarnished appeals to white masculinity. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Trump said of Mexican immigrants in 2015, a comment that catalyzed his campaign to become president. Trump didn’t introduce this rot into American society, but he has caused it to metastasize. Anti-extremism researchers have connected American white supremacists to an uptick in violent crimes, including the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia. The alt-right is a real and present danger, and the movement’s face is, for the most part, male.

In a new book, Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology and gender studies at Stony Brook University and the author, previously, of Angry White Men, examines the joint where racism connects with pernicious beliefs about what it means to be a man. Healing From Hate: How Young Men Get Into—And Out Of—Violent Extremism documents Kimmel’s interviews with “formers,” men who made a break from extremist movements in Sweden, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. (Most of his subjects are former white supremacists, though a few are ex-jihadis.) This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This is not your first book about angry white men. Let’s talk about how Healing From Hate builds off your previous research.

Angry White Men, which came out in 2013, was really being done at the same time as I was beginning the research on Healing From Hate. But I focused Angry White Men entirely on the U.S. and I interviewed some active members of various extreme right organizations. At that time I also began to hear that there were these programs to help guys get out of the movement. My analysis was that masculinity issues were all tied up into their entry to these movements, in what they were looking for: the camaraderie, the brotherhood, the feeling of restoring a sense of masculinity that had been taken away from them unjustly. The idea that white men were the victims of reverse discrimination.

I was really inspired by the possibility that they were finding a way to reclaim masculinity outside of the movement. So I began to do research initially in Sweden with a group called Exit. That was the first group that I went to.