Brad Galloway’s online conversations with those spewing xenophobic or white power messages start casually.

“Hey, you wanna chat?” he might write.

You don’t want to scare them off right away, he says.

Galloway doesn’t reach out to just anyone. He’ll suss out their social media profile first, selecting only those showing signs of vulnerability — a crack in the hateful armour. “For example, they could be, like, all over Twitter saying, ‘The government left me behind … I’m all alone.’”

Some simply ignore him. Others blow him off with not-so-kind words. But as long as they keep talking, he’ll keep trying.

“They want to feel like they’ve told you off, but then they want to have a conversation to convince you that they’re right,” he says. “Fine, I’ll listen, whatever. It’s part of the work, right? They’re now engaging with me and not some guy in a hate group.”

Galloway, 39, of Abbotsford, B.C., is part of a small, fledgling network of ex-extremists — or “formers” — who provide mentorship both on and offline to people careening down a path toward violent extremism or who are seeking to escape its clutches. Sometimes, he’ll approach them; other times they’ll be referred to him.

He doesn’t have a graduate degree in psychology or social work. But he does possess a unique body of knowledge — and a certain street cred — having spent 13 years as a bomber jacket-wearing skinhead, first in Ontario and then in British Columbia.

Galloway and other formers admit that a lot of the intervention work they do is “fly by the seat of your pants,” which is why they are joining calls for greater standardization and collaboration with professional social workers and psychologists.

“It’s difficult to measure the effectiveness of these programs,” Galloway told a national security conference in Vancouver in November. “There’s intensifying criticism surrounding it.”

Some critics question whether formers should be involved in intervention work at all.

An article in the Atlantic magazine last September titled “Should We Listen to Former Extremists?” highlighted some of the potential shortcomings in having formers from neo-Nazi or jihadist movements involved in deradicalization.

They included the fact that “what radicalizes one person doesn’t necessarily radicalize another — so any former’s personal experience might not be persuasive to anyone else.” The article also raised the concern that formers might be doing intervention work when they’re still dealing with “unresolved personal problems.”

At best, the current approach to helping extremists deradicalize is an “imprecise science,” according to a recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a global think-tank.

The report said that while formers possess valuable “insider knowledge” and are well-positioned to build trust with radicalized people because of their shared experiences, there is a lack of independent evaluations measuring the success of such efforts.

Ghayda Hassan, a psychology professor at Université du Québec à Montreal, is hoping to change that.

She is the director of the Canadian Practitioners Network for the Prevention of Radicalization and Extremist Violence, an umbrella group funded by Public Safety Canada. It is carrying out an in-depth study of intervention programs across Canada to figure out what works and what doesn’t, as well as a systematic review of academic literature on deradicalization programs from around the world.

And the role of formers is part of that evaluation.

There’s no question formers possess insight into the forces — both social and personal — that can lead to extremism and potential violence, Hassan said. But before they start mentoring others, she said, it’s important that formers really understand the reasons they joined an extremist group, why they left, and how their experience can help others.

The last thing anyone wants is for a former to start mentoring someone and have the experience trigger some kind of trauma within them that could derail the intervention, Hassan said.

“I think it has its positive aspects. And it also has challenges that need to be addressed.”

The review comes as the online recruitment efforts of extremist groups are drawing increased scrutiny.

Researchers Ryan Scrivens and Amarnath Amarasingam recently collaborated on a study that looked at the content of the Facebook pages of 30 of the most prominent right-wing extremist groups in Canada.

The two, from Michigan State University and Queen’s University, respectively, found the pages generally centred around themes related to the threat posed by Islam and the need to preserve white heritage.

The sites made heavy use of memes and unreliable news sources to launch attacks on non-whites, Jews, gay people and feminists, they wrote.

“What is clear … is that the online space is vibrant and buzzing with hateful and xenophobic content, especially on widely used social media sites like Facebook,” and “adherents are forming transnational alliances, promoting each other’s content and world view.”

Brad Galloway once belonged to that world. As he sits at a coffee shop on a drizzly afternoon, it’s difficult to square the soft-spoken father of three with the Nazi-saluting, shaved-head thug of his past. And he wasn’t some low-level associate; he worked his way up to become a chapter leader.

It started in the late 1990s. Galloway was in his late teens when he was recruited at a pub by someone he knew from school. He said he never really bought into the racism stuff, but that he did fall for the anti-government rhetoric and heavy metal music.

Galloway said there was a sense of belonging, a brotherhood, plus a tough-guy persona to boot.

“It was the promise of: You’ll be someone now.”

To be allowed into parties, he had to look the part — you can’t look like a “liberal,” he was told. A bomber jacket and Doc Martens boots soon followed. Tattoos, including one of the Red Ensign flag on his arm, came later. (Once Canada’s de facto flag, until it was replaced with the Maple Leaf in 1965, the Red Ensign has since become a popular symbol within the white nationalist movement — a throwback to a time when Canada was much less diverse.)

But Galloway also wrestled internally with the fact that his job as a mall security guard in the heart of Toronto put him in contact with people he was supposed to hate, but actually liked.

“It was really weird,” he recalled. “I was working with a Jamaican dude and around gay people in retail. After work, I’m hanging around these skinhead types.”

When a near-fatal street brawl with Vietnamese gang members sent him to hospital one night, he was treated by an Orthodox Jewish doctor.

As he looks back on that episode, the doctor’s compassion for him — a guy wearing a swastika-adorned shirt — is clear. But back then, his mind was on more superficial things.

“At that point, it enhanced my prowess in the movement, getting in a fight with those guys, going to the hospital, sacrificing my blood for the race.”

After moving to B.C. in the early 2000s and becoming chapter leader of the Oregon-based skinhead group Volksfront, whose goal was to build an all-white homeland in the Pacific Northwest, Galloway continued to have conflicting emotions.

He remembers helping an acquaintance who was Chinese get a security job. The acquaintance was so grateful that he gave Galloway a watch.

In 2011, Galloway finally broke from the group. He’d grown tired of the ego-driven infighting. And one day, two skinheads from a rival gang showed up at his home.

“They’re at my house saying they want to end Volksfront or end me or … violently remove me from the mix of the movement,” he said in a CBC documentary last year. “And I look over, there’s my daughter banging on the glass.”

His wife gave him an ultimatum: leave the group or lose your family.

While he didn’t get much grief from other members when he left, rewiring his brain after all the hate he’d been exposed to took time.

“It felt like it was more of a process than I could deal with,” he said.

A friend suggested he check out a group called Life After Hate.

Based in Chicago, Life After Hate is a non-profit made up of people who once belonged to the white power movement but, according to promotional materials, “got out before it destroyed us and those we love.”

One of the organization’s co-founders, B.C. native Tony McAleer, a one-time member of the White Aryan Resistance, became Galloway’s mentor.

McAleer told the Star that, usually, it’s childhood emotional trauma that drives people into violent extremism. For Galloway, losing a friend in a car accident was one in a series of traumatic events in his childhood that he thinks may have led him astray.

“Human beings are motivated by two sorts of primary drives: to feel safe and to feel loved,” McAleer said. “And if we don’t get those in a healthy way, we’ll go get them somewhere else.”

Related to that trauma is what he calls a feeling of “toxic shame” — a feeling of not being good enough or smart enough, of being worthless or unlovable. So people overcompensate to mask the shame.

“What’s the word that’s the opposite of shame,” McAleer asks, before answering: “Pride.”

For some, that can translate into white pride.

In a book he published last year called “The Cure For Hate: A Former White Supremacist’s Journey From Violent Extremism to Radical Compassion,” McAleer described how he walked in on his father having an affair with another woman when he was 10 and how that filled him with “shame, anger, guilt, and most of all, betrayal.” (The Star excerpted the book in October.)

His grades fell and he started getting in trouble in school. In his teens, he started to rebel against “everything and everyone” and joined the punk and skinhead crowd.

McAleer says when it comes to mentoring someone who wants to leave a hate group, the process is less about tearing down the group’s ideology than it is about addressing these sorts of underlying issues that made them susceptible to that ideology in the first place.

You’re not giving that person a pass necessarily, but you do want to give them space to express their grievances, he says. “If you remove someone’s fear and anger, then the ideology doesn’t make as much sense anymore.”

The process of deradicalization can be an isolating one, he says. When you join an extremist group, you’re basically excommunicating yourself from your loved ones. When you decide to leave that group, you’re excommunicating yourself again.

McAleer calls this time period “the void.”

“Friends, family and society are not sitting there with open arms to welcome us back,” he said. “You don’t have a social circle, you don’t have an identity necessarily.”

That’s where he said formers can play an important role in offering the support of community and helping a person rebuild their identity.

In Galloway’s case, he covered up his tattoos, returned to school and is now close to completing an undergraduate degree in criminology. He got hired as a research and intervention specialist at the Organization for the Prevention of Violence, an Alberta-based non-governmental organization. He also started making public speaking appearances about violent extremism and became a volunteer mentor at Life After Hate.

As a mentor, Galloway said he takes the same non-judgmental approach that McAleer took with him.

“The biggest thing I do is I never try to challenge their ideology from the onset,” he says. That’s because he knows how ingrained those thoughts can be. You’re never going to get anywhere by telling someone ‘don’t think this way.’

“I’m apolitical when it comes to dealing with clients.”

Despite the certainty of the formers that they can help, skepticism about their usefulness persists.

In a 2014 research article, Liz Fekete, director of the Institute of Race Relations, a British think-tank, wrote that intervention programs in Europe that use formers are built “on the shakiest of intellectual and ethical foundations” and have a tendency to view people who join neo-Nazi groups as “lost sheep” who come from troubled backgrounds and are searching for identity.

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She expressed doubt about their claims of success and noted the way they tended to focus on clients’ grievances instead of their ideologies.

Too often, she said, people who leave hate groups are too quickly invited to workshops and conferences where they’re treated like experts in violence prevention and attain an almost rock-star status.

“Leaving the scene is not in and of itself proof that a person has dealt with his ideology or come to terms with his actions; this needs to be examined in a far more sustained and sensitive manner,” she wrote in the article, published in the journal Race & Class.

In an email, Fekete clarified she’s not saying there can never be a role for formers in intervention work, but wrote: “I would say that ‘formers’ must have atoned for any racist violence they carried out in the past, before they can possibly be seen as partners in any anti-racist project.

“They need to be 100 per cent honest about this, recognizing and apologizing to all they have victimized in the past.”

In his book, McAleer devotes a whole section to “atonement.” He describes meeting a Holocaust survivor at a convention and telling her how regretful he felt for once being a Holocaust denier.

He also writes about attending a house party and feeling compelled to tell a group of gay men how ashamed he was that he and his crew once chased a gay man into a construction site and threw stones at him.

It is true, McAleer told the Star, that leaving a group is only a first step — not the full desired outcome.

Ideally, you want a former to go back and “heal” the community they once harmed. But you can only encourage them to go as far as they want to go, he said.

Depending on the individual, the process of deradicalization and atonement can take many forms, Galloway said. “There’s no linear process.”

He cites one man he’s been mentoring for three years.

“He’s disengaged from a group, but he’s not ideologically disengaged.”

For Lauren Manning of Whitby, Ont., the process of “deprogramming” took three years because her ideology was so closely tied to her identity.

Manning, now 29, spent five years attached to the skinhead movement — first with a group loosely associated with Blood and Honour and then with Hammerskin Nation.

It started when she was 17. She met a guy in an online forum devoted to death metal and he asked her if she was “NS” (a Nazi socialist) or just into “NSBM” (Nazi socialist black metal).

The music, she replied.

He asked her what her heritage was. She told him English, Irish and Italian.

“A fine European background,” she recalls him saying.

Like Galloway, Manning remembers feeling a sense of belonging: someone was actually interested in her. She had a close relationship with her father, but he died when she was 16. She had started binge-drinking and even self-harming. She was craving structure.

One day she went to Toronto to see the guy she’d met online. They were walking through the Oakwood-Vaughan district when he pointed out how diversity had “wiped out” the complexion of the neighbourhood.

“See this influence here? Pretty soon it’s going to migrate out your way,” she says he told her.

As she became more involved, Manning got “1488” tattooed on her neck. A ubiquitous hate symbol in the white supremacist world, the first two numbers represent the 14 words in the white nationalist creed: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The “88” stands for “Heil Hitler.”

Manning’s mom told her she had to choose between her family or her friends.

So she moved out.

Manning said members of the group would go on vandalism sprees, spray-painting hate symbols — including swastikas — on storefronts or throwing rocks through windows. Once, she got a concussion when members jumped her because they thought she’d ratted them out.

Not even that would dissuade her from joining a larger skinhead group, the Hammerskins, who flirted with the idea of segregation and wanted to build their own all-white community.

Manning said she mostly enjoyed the white power concerts they threw in legion halls. She said she relished being one of the few women in the mosh pit, but disliked how members held traditional views about gender roles. She had zero interest in getting married or having children.

The last straw came when a friend and fellow skinhead was murdered and his mother wrote something on an anti-racism blog that Manning would never forget: “I lost my son when he became involved in these groups and now I’ve lost him forever.”

Separating from the group was a little rough. Manning decided to document on Facebook the process of removing her “1488” tattoo. An old skinhead friend called her a “traitor.”

Her mother, however, welcomed her back home. And she started to make new friends, including people of colour. But shaking the racist thoughts took time. When she’d see people of colour, her mind immediately turned to a racial slur. It made her feel terrible.

“You know how if you listen to a song over and over again, then it gets stuck in your head? That’s pretty much what listening to constant racial slurs and hateful narratives is like.”

But like Galloway, Manning has slowly rebuilt her identity. She now works in construction. In her spare time, she does public speaking events and has mentored a handful of people referred to her by Life After Hate.

The mentoring, she said, has taught her how to be a good listener and how to be patient. “I had to lose the defensive attitude and the aggressive one, too.”

She often asks her clients “what do you want to be in the future?” and then helps them figure out how to get there.

“You have to remain non-judgmental and non-political. (The goal) is to bring out the human in them, their true personality. It’s just buried.”

But are former far-right extremists experts on fascism?

Fekete, the British think-tank director, said she questions that idea.

“I think those who experience racism and fascism know the taste and feel of racism and more about what fascism actually is, than far-right extremists, many of whom still have blind spots.”

Benjamin Ducol, deputy director of Montreal’s Center for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, has heard these concerns before. When his centre hired a former right-wing extremist to be on its staff, it was controversial.

But a radicalized person who is seeking help, more often than not, is distrustful of professionals, Ducol said.

A former can step in and help break the ice and be their first connection to the system. They have instant credibility in the eyes of the client because they possess a “bulls--- firewall.”

The centre now employs three formers, not only for intervention work, but to help with video projects, education materials and training.

John McCoy, executive director of Alberta’s Organization for the Prevention of Violence, acknowledges the science of deradicalization is far from settled. But he said his “gut feeling” tells him that when individuals are ready to exit an extremist group, formers can play an important role by walking them through the experience and telling them what to expect.

“Ultimately, the most effective formers will probably require professional training in areas like social work to be reputable and effective in the long term.”

McAleer concedes this point in his book, saying untrained formers are best used in the early stages of someone’s disengagement or deradicalization. Professionals can take over from there to help with the longer-term self-reflection and healing.

“It is important to know where the role of the former begins, but it’s more important to know where it ends.”

Galloway says there’s no better feeling than when someone he’s mentored drops him a note to say, “Thanks for the inspiration — I left (the group).”

“There’s lots of critics — they’re like, ‘Formers, why would we want to deal with these people? These people are like the worst people.’ Well, people can change. People can legitimately change.”

Clarification - Aug. 11, 2020: A photo caption was edited from a previous version to include more information about the Celtic cross.

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